n01getsout.com’s blog

One of Debian’s greatest strengths is the Debian Free Software Guidelines (DFSG). Among other things, it says that software must be free to redistribute in both binary and source code forms, and that people can freely make and distribute derivative programs from it. While this is one of the principal ideas of both Debian and the open source community, it does not help you if you want to watch a DVD on you computer. This is why Christian Marillat created the unofficial Debian Multimedia repository.

Some software is free of price and free to redistribute in binary form, but the source code is unavailable which makes it non-free software according to the DFSG. Fortunately for you movie watchers, the DFSG only apply to the software that Debian itself redistributes, not what software you can put on your computer.

First you need to find a mirror for your distribution (stable, testing, unstable, or experimental). Then edit your /etc/apt/sources.list file to add the mirror you chose. Finally, type apt-get update and then you are ready to install libdvdcss2 (for watching DVDs), acroread (Adobe’s official PDF Reader), mplayer, and many other things to allow you to utilize different multimedia formats.