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You can use many video players on Debian to read video DVDs, including Xine (or players with a Xine backend, such as totem-xine) or MPlayer. Since most DVDs are protected by CSS (Content Scramble System) you will require the installation of libdvdread4:

# apt-get install libdvdread4


libdvdcss is required for the decryption of CSS protected-DVDs. This cannot be obtained from the Debian repositories due to licence restrictions in various countries. Please also read the /usr/share/doc/libdvdread4/README.css file.

There are various sources for libdvdcss2:

  1. as deb directly from the project's homepage videolan: see

  2. compiled from source from videolan

    • Read the file INSTALL and follow the instructions, e.g.
          ./configure --prefix=/usr
          sudo make install
  3. from the unofficial repository

setting the region

Some DVD players require the region to be set before they are able to play encrypted DVDs. This has to be done manually with regionset. The man-pages provide help in choosing the proper country-code.




total 4



Detecting and mounting

Use to detect your CD/DVD units:

wodim -scanbus


ls -al /dev/cdrom*


You can allow any user mount cdrom adding to fstab:


You can see if fstab points to the right device typing:

dmesg | grep ATAPI


4GB per File limitation


Converting DVD

See also