#libdvdcss — Public Fediverse posts

dvdcss

the never ending story

I wanted to play a dvd I hadn't touched for a while. I had the option of

• nice -1 vlc and
• nice -1 mplayer

to execute playback I opted for vlc gui version, even though I normally use vlc -I cli because of the great logs produced there. While using the gui version of VLC I missed the log output and jumped to mplayer to see the stats. A nice set of parameters were echoed to the CON, but in the output a entry jumped up

• MPlayer 1.5+svn38674-2 (Debian)do_connect: could not connect to socket
  connect: No such file or directory
  Failed to open LIRC support. You will not be able to use your remote control.

• Playing VIDEO_TS/VIDEO_TS.BUP.
  libavformat version 61.7.103 (external)
  Mismatching header version 61.7.100

• Playing VIDEO_TS/VIDEO_TS.IFO.
  .IFO detected. Redirecting to dvd://
  libdvdread: Encrypted DVD support unavailable.

No css library available.

See /usr/share/doc/libdvdread8t64/README.css

for more information.

I had used rpm based distributions which added libdvdread by default, so I had forgotten about it through the years, when I migrated to debian based distro's

This is the output of the file

Content Scramble System (CSS)

Many DVDs use CSS[0] as a form of a Digital Rights Management (DRM) to encrypt
the content of Video DVDs. To play such discs a special library is needed to
decode them, libdvdcss.

Due to the legal limbo of libdvdcss in some particular juristictions, some
distributions including Debian do not distribute libdvdcss.

If it is legal for you to use CSS in your juristiction, you can:

• apt install libdvd-pkg && dpkg-reconfigure libdvd-pkg

• Manually download and compile the source code from
  http://www.videolan.org/developers/libdvdcss.html.

• Use packages from derivatives that include libdvdcss.

[0] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Content_Scramble_System

-- Daniel Baumann [email protected] Fri, 02 Oct 2009 16:10:06 +0200

It was puzzling that debian decided to permanently leave this lib out while this was a thing from 26-9=17 years ago!

The installation process was smoothed out however, I did not need to do

configure; make; make install

instead I only needed to execute

• apt install libdvd-pkg && dpkg-reconfigure libdvd-pkg
• watch the output

Installing:
  libdvd-pkg

Installing dependencies:
  autoconf       dh-strip-nondeterminism  libfile-stripnondeterminism-perl
  automake       dwz                      libtool
  autopoint      gettext                  m4
  autotools-dev  intltool-debian          po-debconf
  debhelper      libarchive-zip-perl
  dh-autoreconf  libdebhelper-perl

When the dependencies are installed (I don't compile sources on this machine other than the distro induced compilations) the lib is downloaded

  /usr/bin/wget --tries=3 --timeout=40 --read-timeout=40 --continue -O libdvdcss_1.4.3.orig.tar.bz2 \
          https://download.videolan.org/pub/libdvdcss/1.4.3/libdvdcss-1.4.3.tar.bz2 \
        || /usr/bin/uscan --noconf --verbose --rename --destdir=/usr/src/libdvd-pkg --check-dirname-level=0 --force-download --download-current-version /usr/share/libdvd-pkg/debian
--2026-08-08 07:03:15--  https://download.videolan.org/pub/libdvdcss/1.4.3/libdvdcss-1.4.3.tar.bz2
Resolving download.videolan.org (download.videolan.org)... 213.36.253.2, 2a01:e0d:1:3:58bf:fa02:c0de:5
Connecting to download.videolan.org (download.videolan.org)|213.36.253.2|:443... connected.
HTTP request sent, awaiting response... 200 OK
Length: 388404 (379K) [application/octet-stream]
Saving to: ‘libdvdcss_1.4.3.orig.tar.bz2’

libdvdcss_1.4.3.orig.tar 100%[===============================>] 379.30K   338KB/s    in 1.1s    

2026-08-08 07:03:18 (338 KB/s) - ‘libdvdcss_1.4.3.orig.tar.bz2’ saved [388404/388404]

The compilation executed smoothly

Partial log

libdvd-pkg: Checking orig.tar integrity...
/usr/src/libdvd-pkg/libdvdcss_1.4.3.orig.tar.bz2: OK
libdvd-pkg: Unpacking and configuring...
libdvd-pkg: Building the package... (it may take a while)
libdvd-pkg: Build log will be saved to /usr/src/libdvd-pkg/libdvdcss2_1.4.3-1~local_amd64.build
Current: =ep cap_wake_alarm+i

• When you own your library (physical books, CD's, DVD's) you need libdvdcss in order to play the latter
• If you are smart and don't own your music (streaming subscriptions, will yank your music away, without warning) you will start fetching the albums, movies (buy them when still possible)
• Inspect your library for oxidation and insects

Conclusion

• libdvdcss is still not included in debian
• 17 years after the fact
• debian will never include the lib
• the download from videolan website is smooth easy and does not require (my) programming skills of sources
• libdvdcss compiles without problems
• you will be reminded by mplayer vlc and others when you play encrypted dvd's

The story of the creation of libdvdcss is one you should read also on wikipedia, which I've included in my sources

sources

mplayer dvd://

vlc -1 cli

man mplayer(1)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Libdvdcss

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CD_and_DVD_copy_protection

https://www.videolan.org/developers/libdvdcss.html

#videolan #TV #dvd #css #libdvdcss #copy #protection #programming #encryption #debian #exclusion

Website for FFMPEG, the Mighty encoding / decoding library suite.

https://ffmpeg.org/download.html

#VLC #libdvdcss #MOC #MPlayer #FFMPEG #command #line #VLC_i #Bash #sh #csh #ksh #zsh #fish #Linux #OpenSource #programming

Website for MPlayer. Better viewable on a horizontal display

#VLC #libdvdcss #MOC #MPlayer #FFMPEG #command #line #VLC_i #Bash #sh #csh #ksh #zsh #fish #Linux #OpenSource #programming

http://www.mplayerhq.hu/design7/dload.html

Website for MOC. You're better off working with the version that comes with your Linux distribution or BSD flavor since that one has all the libraries compiled necessary to run.

https://moc.daper.net/download/

#VLC #libdvdcss #MOC #MPlayer #FFMPEG #command #line #VLC_i #Bash #sh #csh #ksh #zsh #fish #Linux #OpenSource #programming

My motto is; be grateful for all OpenSource software you like to use, give credits to the programmers when you find more useful parameters in your beloved software.

When I play audio files my player of choice has always been MOC; music on console has been stable for decades, is the lightest player I could find and is reminiscent of Midnight Commander / Norton Commander interface.
MOC uses an ncurses interface, has all you need at the fingertips and can play many legacy formats like C64 VIC songs {Last Ninja!} Amiga modules {Das Boot!} with ease.

MOC was released before Video LAN IIRC {I checked}

At a certain point I wanted to play my DVDs in Linux. Logical since my Linux uptime was much, much higher cumulatively, than my win32 uptime, where I gamed. Wine either did not exist yet or could do very little for gaming in general.

Then I learned about libdvdcss thus also about Video LAN.
The fantastic thing about libdvdcss is that you don't have to mess with the region of your player. In that period you had to download libdvdcss yourself from the Video LAN site.
You could only change that region for four times before it becomes permanent at the 5th.

libdvdcss is mighty.

I glanced over VLC, yet didn't brother to download the source code, since I use MPlayer to play my videos in combination with the Mighty FFMPEG library suite. When I finally came around to play with VLC I immediately noticed, how smooth it was coded. I also glanced over the Lua interface, yet left it untouched since I played with MOC, MPlayer / FFMPEG.

VLC X11 UI is handy when you want to move faster than in MPlayer, which made me play more often with VLC when I was in X11.

It was only very recent, that I started to play with VLC in bash.
I was on a notebook which was air gapped so I could not download MOC.
I invoked

`vlc -I
`

What popped up was so beautiful that I was CLI heaven. Every parameter you could think of, where you would normally need to wander with your mouse, you can just type in and get prompted to your shell. You can also do that over the network LAN by the way (wow!)

TIL another powerful feature of VLC cli. If you take the time to add the lyrics of the songs in the album to the directory where the songs reside, VLC will happily show them to you.

I was floored.

This is so efficient.

VLC will not go messing on your internet connection which may be bandwidth metered like mine. VLC cli has so many features you just have to check them out on your own, to see which one you like and then play with them just like I do.

Another impressive feature
One problem we have when we have to downmix 5.1 or 7.1 audio to 2.0 is that the downmix becomes too soft, often 16 decibels too soft. Video LAN fixed that so simple & elegantly.
Video LAN Client is the only one which can push its volume up to 200%!

Thank you Video LAN programmers for this amazing work.

https://www.videolan.org/developers/libdvdcss.html

#VLC #libdvdcss #MOC #MPlayer #FFMPEG #command #line #VLC_i #Bash #sh #csh #ksh #zsh #fish #Linux #OpenSource #programming

@avlcharlie
yepp I'm aware of the file structure and the stuff in the video_ts folders....good old days when frequently doing "backups" 😉 of DVDs.
Well I have to try your approach, especially on protected DVDs.
Is #libdvdcss still a thing? 😅

Ripping would work. Maybe you need #libdvdcss or something.

And BTW playing a #BluRay or #DVD back is no more legal than ripping if it’s still encrypted