Libdvdcss is a highly portable library for accessing and unscrambling DVDs encrypted with the Content-scrambling system system. It is part of the VideoLAN project and is used by VLC and all other open source DVD players such as Xine or MPlayer.

libdvdcss is designed to be platform independent, with versions for GNU/Linux, Microsoft Windows, Mac OS X, BeOS, BSD and Solaris. It is released under the GPL.

libdvdcss is not to be confused with DeCSS. While DeCSS uses a cracked DVD player key to perform authentication, libdvdcss uses a generated list of possible player keys, and if none of them works (for instance, when the DVD drive enforces region coding) it tries to unscramble the DVD using a brute force algorithm. Unlike DeCSS libdvdcss has never been fought over in a courtroom.

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