[sf-lug] Ok, dumb question guys...

[Rick Moen]

Quoting vincent polite (vpolitewebsiteguy at yahoo.com):

> Can a "Home Entertainment"-type dvd player be used as a
> "Computer"-type dvd player. Or, is it the same technology, but used in
> a different way, or the connections are all weird. In other words, do
> I need to buy two? 

Same technology.  

Movie DVDs _per se_ are just data DVDs with some big MPEG sampled
audio-video files and some index files.  You can create them on Linux
pretty easily.  See this HOWTO by my friend (and CABAL regular) Ross
Bernheim:  "Consumer Video to DVD" on http://linuxmafia.com/kb/Apps/AV/ 

Playing _Hollywood's_ movie DVDs on Linux is made more difficult by
Hollywood's addiction to copy prevention ("protection") technology in
the form of Content Scrambling System (CSS) encryption.  Thus, to play 
them on Linux, you need regular movie-DVD-playing software, but also 
the DeCSS library required to cope with that obstacle.

Basically, you probably need to pull down some unofficial packages from
offshore to add software that Hollywood and its pet congressmen would
rather you not have.   Which packages and from where depends on your
distribution.  Some of the other links from
http://linuxmafia.com/kb/Apps/AV/ give some details, but not generally
distro-specific ones.