DVD Movie Playback

Hi chemikalguy;
I have a downloaded version of MEPIS 6 and have downloaded the app-upgrades, and had a look at this string: http://www.mepislovers.com/forums/index.php?topic=488.msg3710#msg3710
maybe you should give it a go too?!
Oh, and you might want to download these as well:
libdvdcss2_1.2.9-1_i386.deb
w32codecs.deb
Just have a look in Synaptic for these.

Ruud
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Compaq N1050v, Pentium 4 1.8 GHz, 1024Mb Ram, Mepis 6.0.
Shuttle SN41G2, AMD Athlon XP 3000+, 512Mb RAM Mepis 6.0.
Linuxcounter user reg # 417292
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Unfortunately, I think in the US, we can't legally apply the app-upgrades you listed because of the Millennium Digital Copyright Act. That's why I'm wondering about the purchased version. I know that some other distros' purchased versions include 'closed source' codecs, and thus are legal in the US. I'm trying to go 'fully legal'.

Thanks for the option, though. If I can't find what I need, I may have to go that route, and use the MDCA 'fair use' clause as my way around the legal hurdle.

Thanks again!

It might not be legal to provide with MEPIS, but you're still allowed to use it, aren't you?

If you download the packages here* and install them with KPackage, you'll be alright!

Ruud

*here they are:
http://download.videolan.org/pub/libdvdcss/1.2.9/deb/libdvdcss2_1.2.9-1_i386.deb
http://www.ubuntu-tr.com/download/w32codecs.deb

libdvdcss2 : ftp://cipherfunk.org/pub/packages/ubuntu/pool/main/libd/libdvdcss/

w32codecs : ftp://cipherfunk.org/pub/packages/ubuntu/pool/main/w/w32codecs/

Have you read this article aswell? MEPIS 6 is based on Ubuntu now, so check if it helps you...

http://ubuntu.wordpress.com/2005/12/04/libdvdcss2-and-w32codecs-for-ubuntu/

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Compaq N1050v, Pentium 4 1.8 GHz, 1024Mb Ram, Mepis 6.0.
Shuttle SN41G2, AMD Athlon XP 3000+, 512Mb RAM Mepis 6.0.
Linuxuserreg # 417292 Tiocfaidh ár lá
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Well chemikalguy, you have just wedged yourself between the rock and a hard place! Lemme give you some dynamite to get you out

First, I Am Not A Lawyer, and I live in the US, so this is merely my opinion.

My understanding of the DMCA is that it's illegal to "break" encryption and other software to deliberately "steal" the electronically stored, copyrighted material. You ask a good question about whether the "purchased" DVD copy of Mepis contains the appropriate codecs. Alas, I do not believe that it does
If you were to check a boxed edition of SUSE you would find the same thing I think (I have not checked the most recent version, so I could be wrong).

Here's the dumb thing. It does not matter that the software is purchased. The problem is that the "licensing" of the software is to particular hardware (the various DVD/CD drives). The "licensed" software is currently Windows Only. The last I checked, there is no legal in the US Linux software.

So the fact that you have legally purchased DVDs and can "legally play" them on your DVD connected to your television, you apparently CANNOT "legally play" that same DVD on a DVD player plugged into your laptop/desktop unless it's running Windows.

Oh, the strange thing about "purchasing" the DVD. You may own the "physical DVD" but you do not own the "content of the DVD"; you merely have "permission" to watch it.

You see, where I get confused is that apparently the DMCA is messing around with (I will not yet say DESTROYS) your "rights of fair use". If you purchase a brand new book, the content is copyrighed, but you can still read it or use the book to potty-train your bird. Since you have purchased the book, you now have the right to give it away or sell it to someone else. Fair use allows you to cite and/or make copies of sections of the book, but I don't believe it gives you any right to copy the entire book. You may be able to make an entire copy of the book for your own reading pleasure but be unable to "sell" it as representing the original book. The DMCA does not allow you to do any of those things with a DVD/CD. I guess you can sell the entire DVD/CD but then should not have any digital copies in your possession.

I may be wrong about many of the above points. Again, I don't "do" law. I would like to be shown to be wrong. But I just wanted to clarify, that in this one situation, the matter is not "solved" by purchase. It appears to be a legal conundrum that will eventually have to be solved in court. In the meantime, you must do what you choose to do

Jon

If 15 million people say a foolish thing, it is still a foolish thing....

And if some half witted bunch of nitwits in the US have deemed it right to go with an agressive lobby of record and movie companies by enforcing consumer behaviour in a law that has no moral justification whatsoever, it is time to summon up some civil disobedience and basically tell them to go and stuff it.

Laws can be stupid, because people in power can be stupid. If the suffragettes had been abiding the law, women would still not be able to vote. Think about it and take a decision that is in line with your conscience.....

Newbie or not Newbie, there's always a question

What do you do if you live in a country where only 2% of the population is aware of a bad law such as the DMCA and half of those don't care? I suspect that most members of the US Congress have'nt a clue.

I am saving my efforts for battling the Patriot Act.

...and there's the dig.

I have the right to watch the DVD because I paid for it, and I really have no concern for who would presume to sit in judgement against me for my exercise of my rights.

It's interesting to see how an author-editor; who probably has nothing to do with Open Source, or the issues our community faces daily; speaks to the issue of copyright and piracy, here: http://www.baen.com/library/

I think you'll find his words quite refreshing.

BTW: The following links are now, unfortunately, stale.
libdvdcss2 : ftp://cipherfunk.org/pub/packages/ubuntu/pool/main/libd/libdvdcss/

w32codecs : ftp://cipherfunk.org/pub/packages/ubuntu/pool/main/w/w32codecs/

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
"You have two labs?"
"Each has its place. At the university, I try to please the Federal Government. Here, I negotiate with God."

This may show up as a blog entry later on:

The DMCA is quite possibly the best example of how powerful lobbyists can manipulate US congressman into doing their bidding. The DMCA, in its original form, basically destroyed the philosophy of "Fair Use" and almost destroyed future research into many arenas, especially security and cases of proving flawed logic. The DMCA potentially restricts the development, research, and use of all digital technology. Here is a fine example:

http://www.wired.com/news/digiwood/0,1412,60780,00.html

There have been some changes to the DMCA and many precedents set in prior court rulings involving the DMCA that has limited its reach. Even the DeCSS was found to be protected by the 1st Amendment as free speech and some forms of revverse engineering are allowed:

www.webmilhouse.com/files/reverse_eng_paper_final.pdf

How many of you have actually read the DMCA of 1998? It is a very lengthy, tedious, quite boring piece of work, but what the hey, here it is:

http://www.copyright.gov/legislation/dmca.pdf

Now to the problem we are discussing; we must first dive into what happened. How is it that the DeCSS code was found to protected under free speech, but the other stuff (compiled source code) is not. I understand that if it is compiled, then it can actually execute and, most importantly, function, but why did the "buck stop here?" The following site may help enlighten everyone:

http://www.cs.cmu.edu/~dst/DeCSS/Gallery/

I will go on to pontificate at some other time, because sleep is needed for the long day tomorrow, but one thing I want to ask is would you pay for a closed source DVD program to stay legal? Turbo Linux is doing something new. They teamed up with Cyberlink to put PowerDVD for Linux on their OS. The following article explains:

http://www.oreillynet.com/linux/blog/2006/07/a_fully_licensed_dmca_complian.html

Make sure to look for a mention of Mepis in there.

Joe Pearce

The student is not above the teacher
The servant is not above the master
The student shares the teacher's fate
The servant shares the master's

http://www.joepearce.com

Thanks everyone for your input. To set the record straight, I did some tiresome research last night, and hopefully can set the record straight on this issue.

It turns out that those who said that you own the media, not the content are partially right. You own the media, as we as 'own' the content - if you agree to the statements made on it, which include things like, you won't distribute the content, etc. It's similiar to a software license - you 'own' the software, as long as you use it only in the ways specified.

As far as playback goes, how the DMCA (and lobbyists) got to jab at Linux users is the whole idea of open source. They banned the publishing of the code (decss) that's used to decrypt commercial DVDs, and thus, made it illegal to be included in open source software - simply because it would be published for all to see. Make sense?

So, what some Linux distro's have (apparently) done, is use the code in a proprietary package that itself is not open source, and that must be downloaded from their site. This way, they're not publishing the code, and not breaking any laws.

Here's the really funny part - any company that publishes the code on servers in the US is breaking the law. Any US citizen who views a website that shows the code, even if it's hosted outside the US, is breaking the law. It's because the decss code is itself illegal to possess in the US. I don't know how this would apply to a guy who wrote his own Linux version in his home and has it freely available for download. I'm not sure if it would be illegal for him to use the code or not. If he's not publishing it, I would think not.

Whew. All that said, I did find that a lot of purchased versions of Linux do contain proprietary software that includes DVD decoding and playback software that is legal.

Thanks again!

Wow, I know this thread has swerved a bit off-topic, but boy has it been educational. Thanks EnigmaOne and joeintenn for the great links. And thanks chemikalguy for bringing the topic up. I know you asked a simple question and ended up on "Slashdot East"

But the topic has lead to some good discussion and learning!

Jon

I have the right to watch the DVD because I paid for it, and I really have no concern for who would presume to sit in judgement against me for my exercise of my rights.

It's interesting to see how an author-editor; who probably has nothing to do with Open Source, or the issues our community faces daily; speaks to the issue of copyright and piracy, here: http://www.baen.com/library/

I think you'll find his words quite refreshing.

BTW: The following links are now, unfortunately, stale.
libdvdcss2 : ftp://cipherfunk.org/pub/packages/ubuntu/pool/main/libd/libdvdcss/

w32codecs : ftp://cipherfunk.org/pub/packages/ubuntu/pool/main/w/w32codecs/

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
"You have two labs?"
"Each has its place. At the university, I try to please the Federal Government. Here, I negotiate with God."
I have a copy of every one of those codecs for MEPIS.
If you guys would like to download them I can set up my webserver to serve them for 10 days, 10 days only, because I don't want to get into legal trouble. Then you can download them as fast as you can and make copies.

I had a feeling that after the GPL police shut it down that they would evenually sqeeze their server itself. I saved the IP address of Cipherfunk before it was shutdown. You can read the IP address here:
http://kb.tafusion.org/link.php?action=detail&id=48

Let me know if you guys are interested in this proposal. I will also be providing the installer source so it can be installed on other distro's. So I say you should take advantage of the this "legal" opportunity. This way it will give you guys a chance to make backups of this material of your own since you might not have seen this wave coming.
SAM

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When downloading binary packages, they are compiled for machine use and not for human reading, so what's all the fuss?

My laptop has a sticker on the bottom with a license for XP, and with that license comes the license to use their decryption. The binary code I have installed is not "me" readable, so I am in a sense, using what I am entitled to use. Their code is supplied with windows in binary form, libdvdcss is supplied in binary form.

In some states and countries, it is illegal to supply a naked computer (ie, without windows (have they heard of linux )) so all those "legal" systems have the license. I think they should be turning their attention to the hordes of illegal windows users, not those that want to use a system like Linux legally.

Smatterbrains that try to "control" the populations preferences through idiotic and nonsensical laws such as the DMCA are interested in nothing other than the bottom dollar, but I have already paid them their half-cent for the use of their software with the purchase of windows, even though I choose not to use it, so as far as I'm concerned, they can get stuffed, I've already paid more than enough, and I do not copy or distribute their media.

I am a law-abiding citizen, but if the law is totally contrary to the simplest forms of common sense and basic human rights, then that law is for nothing other than selfish greed and purely for monetary gain.

Money is a servant, and the love of money IS the root of all evil!

Mike P

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Life may not be the party we thought, but while we're here, we may as well dance.
Break M$'s shackles from your feet and free yourself with Mepis

Mike,
I agree with your statements but that does not mean that the sue'ers have the same type of integrity. They will catch you by the b@*ls whenever they can and yes, Microsoft is in it for the bottom dollar. They could run a country if they wanted (not that they already don't). Korea's gross income is around $40 billion a year. What do ya think Microsoft is making?

They know that if this stuff is freely available (such as the codecs) that they WILL go out of business. So they keep an IRON grip on everything that could possibly be a threat within the next 100 years. That's just the way it is.

But I still say that it is BS that Microsoft goes after us Linux users more than people who pirate Windows. I think it's because pirated copies are still making them money.

How? might you say. Well if someone is running Windows (pirated or not) that means they are only going to be running Windows compatable software (not MAC and not Linux). So as long as their OS is the most used, that's what software developers are going to develop for. So in a way pirated copies are still helping them because they are still a monopoly on the software market.

SAM

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gstreamer codecs
libdvdcss codecs
w32codecs
Those are the Codecs originally from CipherFunk.
They will be up for 10 days.
Todays Date: October 11th
Date will be unavailable: October 21st

These codecs are no longer available on the internet because the GPL police shut down cipherfunk.org.
Click here to see what you should do with these codecs in MEPIS!
Grab 'em while you can!
SAM

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The DeCSS issues are now quite old, and some of us did follow the issues contemporaneously.

The MPAA has no ethical right to do what they have been doing. That's really the short-truth of the matter.

Civil disobedience has always been the correct solution for situations analagous to this.

No. I would, however, pay (and have done so many times) for any number of Open Source DVD programs, simply to support the opposition to idiocy like the DMCA.

When Jon Johansen was acquited, the DeCSS code became our legal property. It's up to us to protect our rights, as well as the rights of others.

If I'm wrong about that, then Thomas Paine really wasn't worth reading, was he?

"You have two labs?"
"Each has its place. At the university, I try to please the Federal Government. Here, I negotiate with God."

I didn't need them for this system, but I have an idea that they will come in handy for future reference.

I think I'll cobble-together a "monster .deb" for my system customization needs (fonts, codecs, proggies that I've come to love), and stuff it someplace where I can access it from customer machines.

Something to do when I'm not reading the threads, here.

"You have two labs?"
"Each has its place. At the university, I try to please the Federal Government. Here, I negotiate with God."

I've actually decided to permanently host them since I had no hand in developing them I think it's ok since I am not able to provide source since I'm not the creator

That's a nice little loophole.
SAM!

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