Enabling DVD playback in Ubuntu is simple enough, and there are various ways to do it. Some might say the easiest – as well as the most legally unquestionable- is to purchase the Fluendo DVD Playback software from the Ubuntu Software Centre.

If you’d prefer to spend the Fluendo costs on physical DVDs rather than DVD software, you can enable DVD playback in your faovurite application by installing a package called ‘libdvdcss’.

‘libdvdcss’ is a small library file that accesses DVDs “…like a block device, without having to bother about the decryption.”

 Last version of libdvdcss is 1.2.13.  (october 2013) Or click here for the sources website:  http://www.videolan.org/developers/libdvdcss.html

The Debian/Ubuntu repository can be accessed by adding the following content to /etc/apt/sources.list

deb http://download.videolan.org/pub/debian/stable/ /

deb-src http://download.videolan.org/pub/debian/stable/ /

And by running

wget -O - http://download.videolan.org/pub/debian/videolan-apt.asc|sudo apt-key add -

It is also part of my post installation script in the Ubuntu install section.