[plug] DVD player

[Peter Wright]

On Wed, Feb 06, 2002 at 06:02:01PM +0800, garry wrote:
> Has anyone had a good experience with a DVD under Linux?

Yes.

> Are they available with onboard decoding which is zone free?

Um. I'm not _quite_ sure what you mean by this... the words "onboard
decoding" imply hardware decoding to me...?

There are a number of different DeCSS-ish _software_ "plugins" that can be
used with Xine to enable playing encrypted DVDs. The package I refer to
below, xine-dvdnav, is one of these.

So basically, you can play any region DVD under Linux, no problem.

> Are they able to read CDRs ok?

...That would depend on the hardware, but almost certainly yes. As far as I
know, most DVD drives are CD drives too.

> Do you just treat them as an IDE device? (Makes sense to me)

Unless they're a SCSI device. :)

> Any traps or tips?

Well, if you're using Debian Linux, just point your /etc/apt/sources.list
to the "unstable" distro, do an "apt-get update", and then:

# apt-get install xine xine-dvdnav xine-ui

...and then run xine. Should be... pretty straightforward from there. :)

I'm sure there are a few other PLUGgers playing DVDs under Linux, so if you
have any further problems ask the list. I'll answer if I have a spare
moment.

Have a look at http://xine.sourceforge.net/  for documentation and heaps of
general info. Actually, if you _do_ have any problems, read the HOWTO as a
starting point.

> Regards
> Garry.

There are a couple of other programs that can play DVDs under Linux, most
notably Ogle (from which Xine borrowed its menu-handling code in the dvdnav
plugin) and MPlayer (from which Xine borrowed some subtitle handling code).
Not sure what their site URLs are, but you'll be able to find them via
Google (or perhaps even linked off the Xine site).

Pete.
-- 
http://akira.apana.org.au/~pete/
There are 2 kinds of people in my world: those who know Unix, Perl, Vim, GNU,
Linux, etc, and those who know COBOL.  It gets very difficult for me at
parties, not knowing which group to socialise with :-)
						Sitaram Chamarty