Oh, I forgot:

whinging like a spoilt little baby

That was good too.
Hope ralph.ronnquist doesn't grumble now.

There's no accounting for morons.  It can't be helped.  You can try to train them, but their brains are lacking a few connections or something.  If you thump one upside the head enough to get it to listen, it'll accept pretty much whatever you pour in, but it still fails to discern fashion from engineering, and can't come up with something new without a diagram drawn in crayon.

Thanks a lot for the answers in this thread. It helped me to find out, why my totem player did not play DVD's.
But it helped me too through the day (I was in a kind of stinking mood, because I wanted to watch that film and not seeking errors)

I must say that you're living up to your nick.

That was good! ;-)
(Did you look up "crankypuss"? I did:

https://www.pinterest.de/pin/1422856694 … 9/?lp=true

even better:
https://crankypuss.wordpress.com/

Thanks again for both: help and laughter

Glad you got something useful from the thread.

That's some other crankypuss.  I used to have a blog (on blogger) called "the Totally Portable Software project" but when i now go to the link i have for it, it demands that i "confirm your profile" and it can kiss my ass because i don't want to confirm any goddamn profile.  Probably if you look it up with your favorite search engine and take the link, it won't ask you to confirm any profile, or maybe Google have decided it was a bad idea and wasted it, no great loss blogger never was good for much imo.

That was good too.
Hope ralph.ronnquist doesn't grumble now.

That was good! ;-)
(Did you look up "crankypuss"? I did:

https://www.pinterest.de/pin/1422856694 … 9/?lp=true

even better:
https://crankypuss.wordpress.com/

Thanks again for both: help and laughter

I must say that you're living up to your nick.

You know what?  I have supported packages.  Not here, not linux, not lately.  In the '80s and '90s within IBM there was a repository called vmtools.  I'm not fresh off the street.  In fact i was learning to write code before Linus was born, and in 1972 i was writing kernel code as a new grad.  It was a good time.

I've been watching the software industry go downhill since around 2000, and it was bad enough then, but actually it's been going downhill since the late 1970s when Apple was just getting started and Microsoft was doing its thing.

I've been using linux since Ubuntu-oneric, whenever that was, almost a decade i guess, ligaf.  I dug in and learned.  I saw linux early on, when all there was were a few cd's available in any bookstore.  I looked at it then and i've kept an eye on it since.

About the time i got ubuntu tuned up to where it was almost fit to use, putting it bells and whistles like a login page that tells you which of your dozen partitions you are actually running, blah blah.  Wrote some utilities to make life easier.  Life was good, time to get down to some serious code for a change.

Then the next release broke pretty much everything, systemd had its effects.  I fixed my stuff release after release, somewhat incredulous at the primitive tools people were using.

I understand the legal mess.  I understand the technology we invented in earlier generations because i was there and doing some of it.  I understand the emasculating effects of non-competition agreements.  I've started businesses, sold software, perhaps been ripped off by Microsoft but that's dead and gone.

So when i see some of this stuff... bash for krissake, IBM passed beyond that decades ago, and they quit being leaders with OS/360, they no longer have the balls to bet the company.  It's getting worse and worse.  Now everybody is following Apple, first getting rid of the Delete key, then moving everything to the cloud.  Adobe has made Photoshop "rental only", and is gimp ready to step in?

Whatever.  When i was actively in the industry, i had a family to support.  Since i retired in 2000 i haven't been doing much software.  Since my wife died i've been doing even less.  Now i'm coming back to life and the whole FOSS thing pisses me off.

Oh, i'm absolutely in favor of free-and-open-source-software, but the legalities of it all rather displease me.  And mixing FOSS and proprietary is a huge mess for legal reasons.

But folks, we don't have to let it stay this way!  We can actually start software moving forward again, instead of getting our emojis updated!

Bah, nobody cares, and nobody believes some used-up old never-was.

That's okay, i don't care that much either.  I'll only ever write one more app anyway.

At least there are some folks here worth arguing with, a couple of them could use a thump upside the head with the stupid-stick, but karma is real and the effects you've caused will come around to kick your ass sooner or later. 

We know what can be done, we just don't bother to do it.

libdvdcss2 is opensource GPL software designed to bypass the encryption on DVDs.

The reason why it can't be included by default in Debian/Devuan is because of US copyright law. As I understand, it is illegal in the US to distribute software designed to bypass copyright protection. VLC can produce and distribute libdvdcss2 because they are based in France, where copyright law is less restrictive. Notice how the package downloads the source code from VLCs servers and builds it locally.

This has nothing to do with "beta quality software" or "the Linux community". Windows, and other proprietary operating systems, can play DVDs out of the box because they are able and willing to pay licensing fees for proprietary codecs. They don't need to jump through hoops to enable users to view content they legally purchased. If anything, the problem is with DVDs themselves.

If you want a Linux Distribution that can include codecs, try Linux Mint. It's based in Ireland, which also has less restrictive copyright law. Mint is also more likely to "just work" without putting in the effort, which seems to be what you're looking for. Just be prepared to get frustrated when it becomes a massive pain to do any significant customization, and expect systemd to give you grief.

Dvd rom and CD rom will be a thing of the past in the not too distant future imo.

I look forward to you growing up.

*blows raspberry*

Care to explain why i had to go through all this in order to get the codecs that should have been installed as part of the VLC package?

Because Devuan derives it's packages from Debian and the extra content needed to play DVDs violates the DSFG and so cannot be included in the official repositories.

You would already know this if you spent your time researching the subject instead of whinging like a spoilt little baby.

Care to explain why i had to go through all this in order to get the codecs that should have been installed as part of the VLC package?

Because not every user of VLC needs to see DVDs. But, IMHO, libdvdread4 could be a recommended package of VLC.