A Noble Thought, A Royal Pain

My next task in Edubuntu was to burn an audio CD from a few MP3s files obtained from the project gutenburg. I inserted a blank CD-R into my drive and was prompted to Ignore it, Make an Audio CD or make a Data CD. I selected Audio CD and a program called Serpentine came up. I dragged the first file to the program and immediatly received an error stating that I had an unsupported file type and to make sure I had the GStreamer Plugins needed to decode it.

I tried to simply play the MP3 file and Totem came up and said it did not have the proper decoder installed. I decided to try the online help accessible from the Help menu in Totem and it took me to a page that said "Soon this page will contain support options specific to totem in Ubuntu. In the meantime you can get help for Edubuntu in general from..." REAL HELPFUL!

There was a menu on the left side of the page and one of the options was Support so I clicked on it. The 6th issue down in the list was about files and DVDs not playing in Totem. Clicking on the link took me to a page that had a URL that describes why totem does not play most files by default.

Due to license agreements and issues with them, Edubuntu does not come packaged with the goods to decode certain file types. The page also included detailed instructions (that worked! ...imagine that) on how to fix this. I followed the instructions and added a few packages to my OS.

The next step was to get a package called libdvdcss2. The link for this took me to a site with over 50 files that I could not see the complete labels on. I played around and clicked on different files until I found one that the Edubuntu Package Installer liked. When I went back and looked a little more closely, they appear to be broken down by Machine Architecture since the have things like HPPA, PowerPC, SPARC etc in the names. The one I found that works is libdvdcss2_1.2.5.1_i386.deb (there is an older version that also works with _i386 at the end of the file name).

After I installed this package, GXine didn't have a problem with store bought DVDs. (though the display is horrible) Totem Movie player played the MP3 files, and I was able to use Serpentine to create a music CD from the MP3 files.

Not having these features bundled due to user agreements is a noble idea (and some claim a legality) but it is also a royal pain in the neck. I did not have to agree to anything when I installed the extra packages and am not sure if that is completely legal or not. If it is legal, why can they not be include in the first place without a seperate license agreement...???