SuSE 9.1 Personal not good for multimedia?

[Jing Su]

> On Mon, Jul 05, 2004 at 08:27:12PM -0400, Chris Aitken wrote:
> > I am a day away from installing SuSE Personal 9.1 (epressly for
> > multitrack sound recording) and then I came across this warning at
> > http://www.madpenguin.org/Article1226.html. This review advises that
> > SuSE 9.1 Personal is good for everyone but me:
> >

There are a number of websites out there explain why basically all
currently available DVD players in Linux are illegal (or the libraries
they use are illegal), and the reasons behind the [De]CSS debate.

As a quick summary:
Basically, CSS is not an open standard.  It's controlled by the CSS
Consortium.  In order to get access, you must pay a fee (too hefty for
any open source project to afford) to be part of this consortium to get
keys for CSS.  However, any project that pays to get access to the keys
must agree to keep those keys secret, and take extreme measures to protect
those keys.  This is half the reason why there are no "legally" available
linux DVD players.
  The other half is that under the DMCA, it is illegal to break protection
mechanisms.  One side of the argument is that linux DVD player projects
break it for inter-operability, which should be legal.  The CSS consortium
argues that breaking CSS is for the purpose of piracy.


Now, if you believe that you have a personal right to play DVDs, there are
several programs you can get to play DVDs in GNU/Linux.  I personally use
MPlayer.  There is a brief article on LinuxJournal about other options
here:
http://www.linuxjournal.com/article.php?sid=5644

MPlayer is very easy to build from source, so I imagine that binary
packages for any of those players should be really easy to install and
run.


-Jing
--
The Toronto Linux Users Group.      Meetings: http://tlug.ss.org
TLUG requests: Linux topics, No HTML, wrap text below 80 columns
How to UNSUBSCRIBE: http://tlug.ss.org/subscribe.shtml