On Mon, Aug 13, 2001 at 05:57:45PM -0500, Peter Seebach wrote:
> I know it's not possible (barring a change in the DMCA) for people living
> in the unfree world to view *encrypted* DVD's on NetBSD systems.  However,
> I'd love to know what those of you who don't live under the DMCA are doing,
> on the off chance that I some day find myself in a free country.  ;)
> 
> What's good for MPEG-2 playback?

pkgsrc/graphics/dvdview exists, but it's a bit less than ideal. It
doesn't play audio itself. Instead, if you supply the -A flag, it
will spit the audio out on stdout, so you can then do something
like:

  dvdview -A some.mpeg | mpg123 -

The down side is that there's no way to sync the audio, and it's
almost always out of sync. I don't know how or if this deals with
reading off an actual DVD (or grokking region encoding, etcetera). I
would guess that you'd still have to use something like DeCSS to get
the mpeg2 file off the DVD. (Which would, of course, be illegal in
the US or any State with a similar law. Unless you were using the
software for backup purposes only, in which case it's okay. Unless
you wrote the software yourself, in which case you're a crook again.)

Of course, if you *really* want to break the DMCA, you could always
view divx movies with pkgsrc/graphics/apla (our temporary
replacement till aviplay behaves again), but I, needless to say,
haven't the foggiest where you would get those movie files.

If someone knows something I don't, feel free to enlighten me, but
as near as I can tell, this is the best pkgsrc has to give right
now.

-- 
       ~ g r @ eclipsed.net