XINE

From openSUSE

XINE is a mediaplayer for Linux.

Legal Matters

Movie player applications on SuSE Linux are unable to play a number of movie file formats, especially movie DVDs. Due to patented codecs and copy protection, SuSE is not allowed to deliver full-featured movie players with the distribution.

The xine-lib package is especially affected. It is missing some plug-ins, so all xine-based players (like kaffeine, totem or noatun) are also unable to play these media.

Please do not write bug reports to these projects when you are unable to play files, because this is not a bug, but a legal requirement and neither the authors nor SuSE have a chance to fix this.

Unfortunately there is, to our knowledge, no legal DVD player for Linux currently sold by anyone.

Working around

This section is not endorsed in any way by Novell or xine authors

It is a well known fact that one can successfully play DVDs by installing a couple of rpm packages - there is no point in hiding such information from users.

Although the xine-lib version provided by SuSE does not contain any patented codecs, complete (all codecs enabled) xine packages are provided by third parties. This is particularly useful to be used in countries were software patents are not an issue. Non-official xine packages are provided, for example, by Packman as seen in Additional_YaST_Package_Repositories. If you prefer you can goto the Packman website and install xine (all codecs enabled) via the one click install for OpenSuSE. Click here for xine with MPEG/DIVX/DVD support (Note: Packman's xine package is called libxine1 and it is equivalent to SuSE's xine-lib).

Newer xine (1.0.x) releases come with a full-featured DVD plugin that should be able to handle any unencrypted, non-locked DVD with full menu navigation support. - source: xine's FAQ.

In order to be able to play encrypted DVDs one will also need to install the libdvdcss library. The legality of using such library is more controversial than of those patented codecs, but VLC project is known to host it and also provides openSuSE rpms.

References

• http://www.xinehq.de/
• http://xinehq.de/index.php/faq#AEN236
• http://www.softwareinreview.com/cms/content/view/84