NOTE: If you are still running a 2.4 kernel you will have to follow the instructions on Getting DVDs to mount so I can watch movies. (2.4 Kernel)

Since I wrote original page (almost a year ago) I've switched to a 2.6 kernel and lots of things are a lot better, so when John (maintainer of this site) had a go at getting DVDs to play on his laptop last night after trying unsuccesfully in WinXP. He did it in about 15 minutes. I'm just copying what he did (which was following the instructions by Bryce Moore from http://www.student.cs.uwaterloo.ca/~bamoore/projects/debian_on_t41/. To save you the time I've just copied the relevant text from this page:

Playing DVDs

I have xine working well. apt-get install xine-ui installs the basic player. You also need the libdvd modules if you want to play encrypted DVDs (basically every DVD). As of this writing, you could get a debian package http://download.videolan.org/pub/libdvdcss/1.2.8/deb/. I can't remember if you need anything else. You also need a symlink to /dev/dvd from /dev/hdc. You can run xine-check to check your installation of xine. xine dvd:// invokes xine and starts playing a DVD in your DVD drive.

1. I downloaded http://download.videolan.org/pub/libdvdcss/1.2.8/deb/libdvdcss2_1.2.8-1_i386.deb
   

   NOTE: I haven't linked directly to the download because in Australia it's not legal to play encripted DVDs (just about all commercial movie DVDs) without a licence and I'm a bit parranoied. Theoretically if you own a DVD player or have a licenced player for Windows you own a licence but...
   Just copy the URL and paste it into the address bar of your browser and go.
   Sorry for the inconvenience.

2. then I did sudo dpkg -i libdvdcss2_1.2.8-1_i386.deb
3. I didn't need to creat the symlink.
4. John had issues with Xine so he installed Totem which worked fine (doesn't look as swish as Xine but...) Both worked fine for me.