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Comment by 208Gi | Hacker News Reader

I cannot remember having any trouble playing DVDs on a Linux based system within the last decade. Through this time, I've used: Debian, Fedora, Ubuntu, Slackware, Arch and, Suse. If your distro doesn't come with DVD playing capabilities out of the box, there are plenty of instructions regarding this on the the web.

I have a hard time seeing how you could possibly be being honest about this.

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I have a hard time seeing how you could possibly be being honest about this.

Isn't distributing libdvdcss illegal in the US and therefore most distributions don't include it? So, most distributions don't come with full DVD playing capabilities out of the box.

This. This is the reason for parent's complaint - it's legal, not technical. I have exactly the same experience of "30 mins hacking to make a new system play DVDs" - sure, it's a single package install usually, but which package? libdvdread? libdvdcss? Does the package include the library, or does it contain a script that downloads the library because of the legal issue? I know the answers to these questions on Debian because I use it so much (and it has a well updated wiki), but plonk me in front of a distro I've not used before, or with poor documentation for their particular idiosyncratic way of end-running the law, and suddenly it's a minefield.

I should have been clearer, I guess. Yes, there's some legal issue but - a google search is not illegal. The poster was saying he/she has to go through some lengthy process every time he/she wants to watch a DVD? That's the dishonesty I'm talking about. Getting dvd playback working in a distro is a do it once and forget about it until EOL type thing.

True for Fedora, probably Debian, probably not Ubuntu.

For Fedora, it's a matter of adding the RPMFusion-nonfree repository, and installing a couple of packages.

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