DVD Dillema!!!

[ThePreacher]

Once again I need help. This time with playing DVD's on my Mandrake Linux 9.1 computer. Right now I am sucessfully playing encrypted DVD's using Ogle, however, it is slow and choppy. Xine is so much smoother, how would I go about making xine able to read encryptyed DVD's? By the way I am aware of the legality of this issue.

[Void Main]

According to this you should only have to:

urpmi libdvdcss2
urpmi xine-dvdnav

[ThePreacher]

Void Main, you have no idea how much this helped me, not the DVD part, but the link to setting up urpmi correctly. Why is it that I can never find the good links?

[Void Main]

I am one with Google. :)

[ThePreacher]

Ok void here is an update. I couldnt get the rpm for xine-dvdnav. Im not sure why. I even went to rpmfind.net and they only had links if you were a member of mandrake club. So I guess Ill be compiling from source. The dvdcss thing was something i downloaded to use ogle so I dont need that.

[Void Main]

Well, I can't give you first hand knowlege of this for two reasons:

1) I don't run Mandrake.
2) I don't have a DVD drive in any of my computers. I use this old fangled thing called a TV to watch movies. :)

I can only go by what the Google gods tell me. :)

[richardh]

Ok void here is an update. I couldnt get the rpm for xine-dvdnav. Im not sure why. I even went to rpmfind.net and they only had links if you were a member of mandrake club. So I guess Ill be compiling from source. The dvdcss thing was something i downloaded to use ogle so I dont need that.

You can find all of the Mandrake Club stuff at http://rpm.pbone.net.

good luck

[ThePreacher]

Ok void here is an update. I couldnt get the rpm for xine-dvdnav. Im not sure why. I even went to rpmfind.net and they only had links if you were a member of mandrake club. So I guess Ill be compiling from source. The dvdcss thing was something i downloaded to use ogle so I dont need that.

You can find all of the Mandrake Club stuff at http://rpm.pbone.net.

good luck

Thank you richardh, I was able to download all of the files I needed. Unfortunately I discovered that Xine is not a viable solution for watching dvd's in linux. The only thing that shows up crystal clear is the FBI warning, everything else, including the movie and menus, is covered in digitized green boxes that make the movie unwatchable. Interestingly enough the sound is perfect. Just for comparison sake I played the movies with no problem under Ogle. Now if Ogle wasnt so darned choppy. Well this leaves me with one last option. Maybe the DVD playback with mplayer is smoother, or does this have to do with dvdcss itself? The state of playing dvd movies in linux is dismall.

[Calum]

how do you know it's dismal if you haven't even tried mplayer yet?

[Tux]

Have you tried using Xine with a different video output/driver, using the -v switch? See 'xine -h'

[ThePreacher]

how do you know it's dismal if you haven't even tried mplayer yet?

Its obvious its dismall since first of all, you can not legally play encrypted DVD's on linux. This makes it dismall alone. Second there are only three dvd players for linux that I know of ogle, xine, and mplayer. One of these players out of my experience, Ogle, was not high enough quality to enjoy your dvd experience. The other wouldnt even play encrypted dvd's in a watchable manner. Meanwhile windows computers and macs have the ability to play encrypted dvd's out of the box. How can I convince someone to switch to linux when they cant even watch the dvd's they own. They will tell me how easy it is to use Windows Media Player or Apple DVD Player to watch dvd's and how smooth it is, and I will have nothing to show them. That is unless mplayer is the answer to my problems. I see no end to the legal issues unless a linux distributor like red hat is able to come up with the money to develop a closed source, quality dvd player that comes with their distribution. The only problem is that I believe this would cost a lot of money, that no linux company has, and the issue isnt big enough to warrant concern for them.

[Void Main]

Sounds like encrypted DVDs should be boycotted to me. But then I just can't see why anyone would want to watch a DVD on a computer. I know many people do but I just don't understand it. I have better things to do with my computer especially since I have a really nice TV and use my PS2 for a DVD player. Even still, encrypted DVDs cause me a headache because I can't have my PS2 plugged in through my VCR and be able to watch the encrypted DVDs. The PS2 must be plugged directly into the TV. I don't have any interest in making copies of the DVD yet I am inconvenienced by the encryption, encryption on something that *I* paid for. I now make it a point not to by these crippled disks, even though I alone will not make an impact.

Having said that, I can see where playing them on a laptop on road trips might be convenient. Is it the speed of the machine that causes the quality to bad, does it skip? Have you tried it on a faster machine? Could it be the video drivers? I know installing the proprietary nVidia drivers made a significant improvement on my system for these types of apps.

[Tux]

On the subject of TV/Film, RevolutionOS is out to buy now. I saw it online somewhere, possible thinkgeek, not sure.

[ThePreacher]

Sounds like encrypted DVDs should be boycotted to me. But then I just can't see why anyone would want to watch a DVD on a computer. I know many people do but I just don't understand it. I have better things to do with my computer especially since I have a really nice TV and use my PS2 for a DVD player. Even still, encrypted DVDs cause me a headache because I can't have my PS2 plugged in through my VCR and be able to watch the encrypted DVDs. The PS2 must be plugged directly into the TV. I don't have any interest in making copies of the DVD yet I am inconvenienced by the encryption, encryption on something that *I* paid for. I now make it a point not to by these crippled disks, even though I alone will not make an impact.

Having said that, I can see where playing them on a laptop on road trips might be convenient. Is it the speed of the machine that causes the quality to bad, does it skip? Have you tried it on a faster machine? Could it be the video drivers? I know installing the proprietary nVidia drivers made a significant improvement on my system for these types of apps.

Well Void, I might believe that speed of the machine was an issue if not for the fact that this 200 mhz machine used to have win98 se with full smooth dvd playback on it. I saw it with my own eyes. That was even with a shitty 4 mb video card. I wiped windows off of this pc for good, but still wasnted full functionality of my hardware. My computer is the only television I have in my upstairs bedroom at my house. I keep my ps2, and dvd player downstairs attched to my 27" flatscreen tv. At night before I go to bed I feel like watching movies sometimes. This would make it very convenient. I have installed Ogle on my 400 mhz laptop, and it was just as choppy. My friend installed it on a system with a 1.3 ghz processor with the same choppiness. By the way I am using the custom nvidia drivers for my geforce 2 and the problem still occurs. If it isnt actually the player, maybe this has to do with dvdcss being inferior in quality since it was reverse engineered.

By the way, has anyone been able to get smooth, quality video out of encrypted dvd's on linux? If so tell me system specs, and what software you are using.

[Void Main]

I have to believe this can be rectified. I can't imagine that everyone has this problem or there would be a lot of yelling going on.

Assuming the above is true do you have DMA enabled on your DVD drive?

Do you have ACPI enabled?
http://www.ox.compsoc.net/~swhite/DVD/

Another link with what looks to be a lot of info:
http://www.linuxvideo.org/

Do you have a lot of unnecessary processes/services running some of which may be getting CPU priority? How about using up I/O resources? How much RAM does your machine have?

Like I said I don't have a DVD player but I can't really do anything but speculate. I would imagine that 200Mhz would be right on the edge though as playing video alone is resource intensive, throw decryption on top of it (which is also resource intensive although not nearly as much as encryption) and it may just be causing your problems. Also remember that Win9x is a really stripped down OS that doesn't have a lot of system things to think about and can dedicate more of the machine to a single process (like a DVD player). I'm curious if you installed Win2k or XP on that machine if it would be able to play DVDs as nicely as Win9x does. Linux is more along the lines of a Win*NT than a Win9x.