04.16
Only recently I noticed the Fluendo DVD Player, which is supposed to play DVDs fully legally anywhere in the world (with official patent licenses and all).
The Fluendo DVD Player is a proprietary application, though a very nice one at that. It’s a proper GNOME application, HIG wise, it truely looks like a native GNOME application (screenshot done on Ubuntu Lucid):
When talking about functionality there’s not much to say, it’s a no-nonsense DVD player, it does what it should, nothing more nothing less… It plays encrypted DVDs, there’s a tool to set your DVD drives’ region, and the DVD menu’s work…
In contrast to most other commercial software available for Linux, Fluendo provides proper stable AMD64 builds, proper packages for Debian/Ubuntu, with all files put in their proper locations. They’re not cluttering up /opt.
The price isn’t bad either, the base price is 20EUR one year of updates included (extending this term isn’t expensive either). Buying from Fluendo is like giving to charity anyways, the Fluendo blokes did a lot of good open source work on GStreamer.
UPDATE: Since I bought the Fluendo DVD Player 8 month’s ago, at least three updates have been released which means this product is being actively maintained, which is a good thing!
