How to play Encrypted DVDs on Ubuntu Linux

To play encrypted DVDs, the libdvdcss2 package is essential. libdvdcss2 is a simple library designed for accessing DVDs like a block device without having to bother about the decryption. More information about this package can be found at VideoLAN.

You can install libdvdcss2 as a 64-bit .deb package without installing the Medibuntu repositories:

$ wget -c http://packages.medibuntu.org/pool/free/libd/libdvdcss/libdvdcss2_1.2.10-0.2medibuntu1_amd64.deb
$sudo dpkg -i libdvdcss2_1.2.10-0.2medibuntu1_amd64.deb

32-bit .deb package:

$ wget -c http://packages.medibuntu.org/pool/free/libd/libdvdcss/libdvdcss2_1.2.10-0.2medibuntu1_i386.deb
$ sudo dpkg -i libdvdcss2_1.2.10-0.2medibuntu1_i386.deb

You can also use guidelines provided at Medibuntu. This will install the Medibuntu repositories on your system and then install the libdvdcss2 package:

$ sudo wget http://www.medibuntu.org/sources.list.d/jaunty.list --output-document=/etc/apt/sources.list.d/medibuntu.list
$ sudo apt-get update
$ sudo apt-get install medibuntu-keyring
$ sudo apt-get update
$ sudo apt-get install libdvdcss2

You can also install 32 bit or 64 bit Windows multimedia codecs (if you haven't already done so using ubuntu-restricted-extras):

$ sudo apt-get install w32codecs
    or
$ sudo apt-get install w64codecs

Instead of downloading directly from Medibuntu, you could also use the script included with the libdvdread4 package to download and install libdvdcss2:

$ sudo apt-get install libdvdread4
$ sudo /usr/share/doc/libdvdread4/install-css.sh