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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.