How to Play DVDs and Blu-rays on Linux

How to Play DVDs and Blu-rays on Linux

Commercial DVDs and Blu-ray discs are encrypted. The Digital Rights Management (DRM) is designed to prevent you from ripping them, copying them, and watching them on unsupported players. You can get around this protection to watch DVDs and Blu-rays on Linux, but it’ll take some tweaking.
DVD discs work well, and all DVDs should work after you install a single library. Blu-rays are much more hit-and-miss, and only some will work–particularly older Blu-ray discs. Also, both of these require that you have the right disc drive in your PC–a DVD drive if you’re looking to just play DVDs, and a Blu-ray drive if you’re looking to play DVDs and Blu-ray discs.

How to Play DVDs on Linux with VLC

The free VLC media player can play DVDs on Linux, but it requires a special library known as libdvdcss. This library effectively breaks the CSS encryption on DVDs, allowing you to watch them. The status of this library is legally unclear–it’s potentially illegal under the DMCA in the USA–so Linux distributions don’t generally include it in their software repositories.
But this is actually the same method many Windows users use. Windows 8 and 10 no longer include DVD playback functionality, and the standard advice is to download and install VLC. The Windows builds of VLC have libdvdcss built-in, so you just need to download, install, and start watching. Linux is a tad more complicated.
NOTE: You can also buy a licensed copy of Fluendo DVD Player for $25 on Ubuntu’s Software Center, but most people won’t want to bother. You can get DVDs for free if you’re willing to take just a few extra steps.
On Ubuntu 12.04 to Ubuntu 15.04, you can install libdvdcss by opening a terminal window and running the following commands:

sudo apt-get install libdvdread4

sudo /usr/share/doc/libdvdread4/install-css.sh

On Ubuntu 15.10 and up, run the following command instead. Follow the instructions that appear in the terminal to install libdvdcss:

sudo apt-get install libdvd-pkg

For other Linux distributions, perform a web search for “install libdvdcss” and the name of your Linux distribution. You’ll find instructions and third-party repositories that should make the process easy.