Enabling DVD Codec in Ubuntu

So I picked up a couple of DVDs the other week, Airplane and Jackie Chan’s Police Story. I wanted to watch Police Story while surfing, so I popped the DVD in the drive and…. nothing.

I couldn’t get it to work with Mplayer, not with Totem. I futzed around with a couple things and it was probably a good 15-20 minutes before I realized… hey dummy… you never installed the codec’s after you installed 8.04 on this box. duh!

Ubuntu really does word “right out of the box” for.. well.. 99% of what you’d need it to do I suppose. That last 1% they can’t do because of licensing issues - least not without charging fees and crud. But they do make it easy as heck to add the codecs you need. (For those that don’t know what a codec is, think of it like the driver software you need to get your computer and printer to talk to each other, but this allows your media player to read what’s on commercial DVDs.)

Anyways, in order to get what you need to play DVDs, just go to the Applications menu, click Accessories, then Terminal. Then copy the following text:

sudo wget http://www.medibuntu.org/sources.list.d/hardy.list -O /etc/apt/sources.list.d/medibuntu.list && sudo apt-get update && sudo apt-get install medibuntu-keyring && sudo apt-get update && sudo apt-get install libdvdcss2 w32codecs

This gets the files you need form the Medibuntu repositories to make your install of Ubuntu multimedia ready. Just follow the prompts that come up and you should be good to go. Oh, this is for 32bit systems. If you’re running the AMD 64bit version… change that last word to “w64codecs”. I should probably try switching over to that one of these days.

Since this adds the Medibuntu repository for you, you can go to System -> Administration -> Synaptic Package Manager and click on “packages.medibuntu.org/non-free and easily add Acrobat Reader, Google Earth and Skype to your system as well