Multimedia/DVD

= DVD =

DVD support in Fedora is widely discussed in the Fedora Community. Refer to the following:

http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Community_websites

http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Third_party_repositories

Fedora is unable to include support for playback of DVD video because it requires patented technologies and the necessary software may violate the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA), a copyright law of the United States. The MPEG-2 video compression format is protected by patents under United States law and international treaties. The CSS encryption scheme is a copyright protection measure, and the code that open source players must use to decrypt DVD media using this scheme may violate the DMCA since it can be used to circumvent that protection.

For more information about the DVD video formats and limited discussion of its legal status, see the Wikipedia article on the subject:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DVD

For more information about the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, see the Wikipedia article:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Digital_Millennium_Copyright_Act

As an alternative to DVD video, there are patent unencumbered codecs such as WebM and Ogg Theora video format supported in Fedora. Support for this format is also freely available for other platforms. While not as common as DVD video, you may wish to consider using this unrestricted format when encoding video. See our page about Xiph.Org formats for more information:

http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Multimedia/Xiph