[lug] dvd playback with mplayer

[Michael J. Hammel]

On Wed, 2003-11-05 at 08:18, Tony Dyson wrote:
> It might be worth your while to look at the Ogle DVD player. Try the 
> "freshrpms" packages -- http://shrike.freshrpms.net/
> 
> I generally get better results with Ogle, but I have DVD's that will 
> play on one of the packages, but not the other.
> 
> Alex Olivas wrote:
> > i'm using RH9 and mplayer 1.0pre2.

Ogle, Xine and VideoLan are all possible solutions.  I find that I often
have to use one or another to view DVDs.  With MythTV, however, the
MPEG2 playback with MPlayer is quite good.

I used to have problems with MPlayer on my AMD K7 650MHz box, mostly
with switching between full screen and windowed mode.  I use a 3Dfx
Voodoo 3 for display.  However, with RH9 and new RPMs for both Xine and
MPlayer (retrieved from the stock apt-get repositories for RPM
distributions) the problem seems resolved.  If fact, I get much better
full screen support now.  I used to get only partial full screen at
1600x1200 resolution, but now its the entire screen.  This is mostly
noticeable with XawTV, which used to use only a very small portion of
the display.  It still isn't completely full screen, but its much larger
now.  Xine and MPlayer are completely full screen if I have them set to
the right display ratios.  

Note that a video card that has Xv support enabled in the X server may
help with the split screen issue.  If your video card is very old,
upgrade it - most modern ATI and NVidia cards are supported quite well
now, and that will help with display issues, though not necessarily with
playback since software mpeg decoding can be very CPU intensive.  I
haven't looked at any mpeg hardware decoding support in video cards but
I'm using a WinTV PVR 250 with MythTV to playback mpeg with hardware
decoding.  The Via mITX motherboards (Epia Eden-T based boards like the
M10000) also have hardware decoders with NTSC output which are supported
under Linux.  You have to buy the whole motherboard to get it, of
course.
-- 
Michael J. Hammel                               The Graphics Muse 
mjhammel at graphics-muse.org                      http://www.graphics-muse.com
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