Playing Commercial DVDs with Gutsy under VMWare Fusion

[Leslie Wright]

Greetings all,

I have been trying to correctly configure Totem Xine to play your 
regular commercial DVDs in my 64-bit Gutsy virtual machine under Fusion 
on my Mac. I have downloaded the required codecs and version of Totem 
using Automatix, gulping hard when I see the red letter warning about 
libdvdcss and the other codecs, but when I try to play yer basic movie I 
get an error dialog asking whether I am trying to play an encrypted DVD 
without libdvdcss.

I thought this may be a 32-bit vs 64-bit thing, so I set up a virtual 
machine with the 32-bit version of Gutsy and got the exact same error 
message when I tried to read a DVD (The Bourne Identity, if anyone cares 
to know).

I know that this is intrinsic to my setup. My wife's laptop died so she 
is using my old PC running 32-bit Gutsy. We set up Totem Xine and the 
codecs via Automatix the exact same way and commercial DVDs play on that 
machine just perfectly.

This message isn't to solicit a solution. It is just sharing an 
observation. I am suspecting there is something in the virtualization of 
Gutsy in my set up that does not recognize the presence of the 
appropriate codec even if it is installed. VMWare Fusion is US software, 
so maybe there is something going on here that prevents users full 
access to the controversial codecs?

No matter to me in the practical sense--the DVD playing software under 
Mac OS X works beautifully and I can view DVDs fine with it. But it 
would be neat to know, if possible, why this setup works well on a 
crappy old machine, but belches in a virtual machine on a shiny new Mac.

Just thought someone might care.

Les

p.s. As a time been firmed up in Toronto for Saturday yet?