Ubuntu and DVD playback

Well, I guess there are really three issues here.

First, Canonical feels they cannot ship libdvdcss because doing so would
be illegal in various countries due to their implementations of the WIPO
Copyright Treaty[0]. For instance, the United States has the Digital
Millennium Copyright Act; various European countries have implemented
the European Union Copyright Directive[1] which has the same effect in
the United Kingdom, Spain, the Czech Republic, Finland and France.

[0] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WIPO_Copyright_Treaty
[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/European_Copyright_Directive

I presume that Canonical does this based on sound legal advice; they
would probably only consider changing this policy if somehow the UK's
Copyright and Related Rights Regulations (2003) is overturned or amended
to legalise the production and distribution of devices or software that
permit the circumvention of DRM, and if the same happened in the US and
the other countries listed. As this is a legal problem and not a
technical problem, this bug tracker is probably not the appropriate
forum to discuss it. Ideally this bug would be marked FORWARDED to the
bug trackers of the parliaments of the countries where this legal
minefield exists.

The second problem will be easier to fix; it is the fact that GStreamer
itself has incomplete support for DVD playback. The major stumbling
block in this area is the support for DVD menus, and the fact that the
GStreamer developers do not seem to be willing or able to work on this
area themselves.

The third problem is totem-gstreamer's incomplete support for DVD
playback via the GStreamer API. The impression I get from upstream is
that this will not be worked on until the DVD playback functionality of
GStreamer itself is finished. IMO, this is a shame as Totem could
currently be usefully improved to work with the functionality that
GStreamer currently provides. For instance, when the user tries to play
a DVD, Totem could construct a playlist consisting of dvd://1, dvd://2,
and so on, one entry for each chapter on the DVD. DVD menu support would
still be missing, but that is not a huge problem (some may even call it
a benefit). I started to work on this myself, but I discontinued the
effort because I got the impression that such a patch wouldn't be
accepted by upstream anyway.

-- 
DVD playing is not working correctly with totem-gstreamer
https://bugs.launchpad.net/bugs/41335
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