Playing DVDs on RHEL5

As a consultant, one critical functionality on my laptop is the ability to watch DVDs- as trivial as it sounds, my laptop serves more than just the sole purpose of a work tool. Outside of work, it's my portal to the world, including personal e-mail, online television, and watching movies. Since I'm staying in hotels 4-5 days a week, I don't have the option to go home to my desktop every day after work. My firm understands this, and while the work laptop is primarily for work, the official policy allows us to use our laptops for "limited personal use," which I believe is the right approach- its more of a quality of life factor than anything else.

So after installing RHEL5 as my primary OS and virtualizing my work OS on KVM (whether this falls under "limited personal use" is somewhat murky :-), I needed to ensure that I could still watch movies on the laptop. Unfortunately unlike Ubuntu, Fedora, or Gentoo, RHEL does not have a robust media offering in the standard supported repositories. One reason being that RHEL is really designed for enterprise use, so generally, DVD playback and media handling is unnecessary. Another reason for RHEL's lack of official support for proprietary formats is due to patent and copyright issues- since RedHat markets and sells its OS and accompanying software, it cannot support potentially contentious packages such as libdvdcss.

Nonetheless, RHEL being Linux, I knew that I'd be able to install a DVD playing application, even if installed from source, however I wanted to avoid installing from source if possible simply because of dependency issues and having to write a seamless configuration file with all the right option flags set.

Since RHEL has its Fedora cousin and CentOS brother, I was confident that I could find the appropriate RPMs to install a media player. I also knew that I'd want to install xine, as I really like its simple interface, large support of proprietary and open formats, and I had had good experience with it in Ubuntu.

I began by installing the RHEL officially supported totem package as well as an rpm of libdvdcss. While both installed rather seamlessly, it appeared that totem either couldn't find or couldn't use the libdvdcss plugin. I then tried installing xine from custom packages, but this proved unsuccesfuly with too many unresolved dependencies. After a bit of googling, this Linux Questions forum post directed me to Dag Wieers (Dutch?) repository, which included Dag's custom yum repository with packages created for RHEL5. Once on the site, installation was relatively painless. To create the repository, only one command is necessary:

# rpm -Uhv http://apt.sw.be/redhat/el5/en/i386/rpmforge/RPMS/rpmforge-release-0.3.6-1.el5.rf.i386.rpm

After that

# yum install xine

The xine package resolved all dependencies and installed cleanly, and sure enough, I can play commercial DVDs with no issues!