[lug] DVD recommendations

[Scott A. Herod]

I think that the only current legal way to play DVDs in linux is to get
a card with a SigmaDesigns 84xx/85xx on it.  XP, I believe, comes with
something called WinDVD which is also licensed.

That said, I've heard that Xine, which comes now with RH7.3, can be
built with a library that you can get off the net which allows it to
play encoded DVDs.  I've also read that a 533 Celeron or 800Mhz Cyrix C3
gives pretty decent playback quality with Xine.

You will need a DVD drive and typically the kernel needs to have SCSI
support built in because SCSI emulation is required for the DVD drive. 
My experience is that DVD drives are well supported in linux.

Scott

Ben Luey wrote:
> 
> I want upgrade my computer so it can play DVD's. I have a k6-300, 128meg
> ram and a diamond viper 330 (4meg) graphics card (an old nvidia chipset,
> but nothing special). Should I buy a dvd decoder card?  Would that help me
> avoid some of the liux codec dvd problems? Do I need a better graphics
> card (or cpu) or can I just buy a dvd-rom? Are the linux drivers / codecs
> such that (with some work) I can play any dvd in linux or if I want that
> must I install windows?
> 
> Thanks,
> 
> Ben