Linux does not come by default with a commercial type Video player.
It would be breaking the copyright law if it did. However you can play
videos by tweaking a bit the Kaffeine and
VLC Movie player programs.
I will explain how to do this in the Ubuntu/Xubuntu/Kubuntu world.
Note, you can only do this for your personal home use. Let us assume
you are using the latest 8.04 Hardy version of Xubuntu with the picture
of a pelican on it.
You will need to add the appropiate codecs and dvd libraries. At
the terminal prompt logged in as root user type:
sudo su
entering your password when prompted.
apt-get install kaffeine
apt-get install vlc
Note, these programs may already be
there.
apt-get install xubuntu-restricted-extras
Note the following very long wget to fetch a file is all on one line.
wget http://www.medibuntu.org/sources.list.d/hardy.list -O /etc/apt/sources.list.d/medibuntu.list
This is where you go to get those special programs to deencrypt
the commercial videos. Now type another very long wget command to install
the libdvdcss2 library I mentioned above.
wget -c http://packages.medibuntu.org/pool/free/libd/libdvdcss/libdvdcss2_1.2.9-2medibuntu4_i386.deb
Next type this:
dpkg -i libdvdcss2_1.2.9-2medibuntu4_i386.deb
Note, this could take a half hour to compile and load. Relax,
it all worked for me the first shot. For a final test go to Multimedia
and then fire off both those movie players.