Re: [vox] [dozakdai@hotmail.com: I am a new Linux user]

[David Margolis <margolid@ecMAPSs.csus.edu>]

Mark (and who-all else),

I had ugly experience with playing dvds in the past.  DVD would work fine
in Win2k on same hardware but looked all choppy and worthless with horrid
sound sync in linux.
Last night (after having had given up for months) I pieced together some
not-very complete howtos I found in various places online.


Anyway try this*

download/compile/install latest libdvdcss (1.2.1 as of this writting)

seen this before?

tar xzvf stuff.tar.gz
cd into stuff dir
./configure; make; make install

http://www.videolan.org/libdvdcss/download.html

Then do the same steps with latest version of mplayer (0.90pre5)
you can configure -with-gui if you want, but i don't like the gui.  the
keyboard shortcuts are awesome!

http://www.mplayerhq.hu/homepage/dload.html

then

pop in a dvd and do something tricky (this is the hardest part of the
whole deal) like this:

mplayer -dvd 1 -ao oss:/dev/dsp1 -vo xv /dev/dvd

non kde users will be able to specify just oss instead of oss:/dev/dsp1
(arts seems to hog dsp?).  alsa users should read the man page, but i
think it's just -ao alsa
non nvidia users might specify x11 where i put xv (i couldn't really tell
the differnce except i have more power to tweak the aspect ratio with the
xv interface, full screen works much better, etc).  you can also specify
opengl and svga for the video option (no x required).

anyway, there are tons of neat keyboard tricks (pause, advance, rewind,
sycn sound, +/- volumn), and they're easy to learn, see mplayer --help

tons of neat options for playback too.  i've yet to gain such instant
gratification from an application.  i like it better than any win32
dvd/media player.

i was also able to play some mpg videos that came with an enhanced music
cd that i recently bought.  that was real cool: watching hip-hop videos
in full screen on linux!

(*)Hardware in question:
celeron 1ghz
256MB pc100 ram
gforce2 MX 400 - 64MB
other stuff


sorry for the long post, but this was a milestone!  this makes me want to
get a laptop with a dvd player!

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