Ubuntu
totem package

  1. Bug #41335 (isembold)
  2. Comment #43

Comment 43 for bug 41335

Revision history for this message
Sam Morris (yrro) wrote :

Ubuntu and DVD playback

Well, I guess there are really three issues here.

First, Canonical feels they cannot ship libdvdcss because doing so would be illegal in various countries due to their implementations of the WIPO Copyright Treaty[0]. For instance, the United States has the Digital Millennium Copyright Act; various European countries have implemented the European Union Copyright Directive[1] which has the same effect in the United Kingdom, Spain, the Czech Republic, Finland and France.

[0] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WIPO_Copyright_Treaty
[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/European_Copyright_Directive

I presume that Canonical does this based on sound legal advice; they would probably only consider changing this policy if somehow the UK's Copyright and Related Rights Regulations (2003) is overturned or amended to legalise the production and distribution of devices or software that permit the circumvention of DRM, and if the same happened in the US and the other countries listed. As this is a legal problem and not a technical problem, this bug tracker is probably not the appropriate forum to discuss it. Ideally this bug would be marked FORWARDED to the bug trackers of the parliaments of the countries where this legal minefield exists.

The second problem will be easier to fix; it is the fact that GStreamer itself has incomplete support for DVD playback. The major stumbling block in this area is the support for DVD menus, and the fact that the GStreamer developers do not seem to be willing or able to work on this area themselves.

The third problem is totem-gstreamer's incomplete support for DVD playback via the GStreamer API. The impression I get from upstream is that this will not be worked on until the DVD playback functionality of GStreamer itself is finished. IMO, this is a shame as Totem could currently be usefully improved to work with the functionality that GStreamer currently provides. For instance, when the user tries to play a DVD, Totem could construct a playlist consisting of dvd://1, dvd://2, and so on, one entry for each chapter on the DVD. DVD menu support would still be missing, but that is not a huge problem (some may even call it a benefit). I started to work on this myself, but I discontinued the effort because I got the impression that such a patch wouldn't be accepted by upstream anyway.