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Play DVDs On Linux
mojo-raisin writes: "After more than a year of development, the first release of OMS has been made on www.linuxvideo.org. For those of you running Debian see this message for an easy installation to your system." Looks like you need a cutting-edge libc6, among other things.
I can't decide which I like best -- the D's or
the V between them.
VideoLan uses SDL and plays very smoothly on my 500Mhz laptop, can play directly from encrypted DVDs, and it doesn't require jumping through a lot of hoops to get compiled/running. It's usable now, releases come in reasonable timeframes, and it keeps getting better, I'll stick with it.
I don't mean to try and take away from the LiViD team. They were the first to start working on a DVD player for linux, and there work has provided the basis but there are several other DVD players for linux. But there are other players which many have reported to be better than oms in the areas of configuration, performance and audio sync. One of these is call VideoLAN which several others have mentioned. It now has css support much like OMS and the performance is suppose to be quite good on lower end system. VideoLAN is not quite as old as OMS but the source was only made available more recently hence less exposure. I believe most of the code in VideoLAN was developed independently of LiViD code except css of course. There is another which has called Xine which is the newest one but reported to be one of the best. I believe this one used the LiVid video and sound system but has tweaked synchronization and performance as well as adding some other feature. This one is also designed to be compatible across several free unix type platforms including *BSD. Note that the standard version of Xine does not come with css support but it can be added with a plugin from here as well as a version with the plugin already built in here. Again what LiViD has done is great but competition as always is good. The only thing I would like to see is some unified plugin standard for these players so that any css plugin could work with any of the DVD players. That way if new DVD's come out that break the current CSS updates could occur much easier for all the projects.
You are the reason why our great nation is facing difficult economic times right now. The way you flout the DVD Consortium and the Hollywood studios angers me to no end, and you are an embarassment to the millions of honest, hardworking American citizens who view DVDs using LEGAL hardware or software.
And it only took you guys about four or five years after DVDs first came out.
Why go to these lengths simply to break the law?
I will never understand you people.
Thank you, and God bless America.
--
George W. Bush
President, United States of America
--
George W. Bush
George W. Bush
President, United States of America
While I'm glad to see that we've finally got viable DVD players for my favourite OS, I wonder about the picture quality. My (uber-picky) graphics person and I got a Mitsubishi Diamond Pro 2040u and a Mitsubishi Plus 200, respectivly. Both are 22", super flat screens. His is running off a 400Mhz G4 with MacOS and the stock video card (ATI Rage 128 Pro, I believe). I'm running a Guillemot 32MB Geforce2 MX on an Athlon 600 (not T-bird).
We played the Matrix on both, first the G4 (Apple DVD Player). Oh my God, I had to change my shorts and take a long shower. This was the best picture I have ever seen. I would swear watching full screen (1600x1200) from the G4 was comparable to being in the theatre as far as picture quality and lack of artifacts goes. We also watched a 320x240 quicktime of Battle Angel Alita, blown up to full screen. The ATI card apearently has a video scaling chip in it, the lack of artifacts (there were still some, heh it was 320x240), and the color quality was exellent.
We tested the Matrix on my box under Win2K and the WinDVD 2.3 software DVD player. Less clarity, colors were a little washed out comparitively (yes we tweaked contrast and brightness on monitor and in DVD player), and the video jittered every now and then (the G4 was as smooth as ).
I'm pretty sure that my hardware has the horsepower to hold it's own against the Apple solution, but they really put a lot of quality into they're software when it comes to multimedia applications.
I just hope that the resources being thrown at Linux DVD don't slow down at 'ok we did it'. IMNSHO, Apple's platform has set a high standard, which is why my graphics developer uses Adobe products on MacOS rather than GIMP and friends on Linux (He does a lot of high end print and 3D work, not just web design).
Besides I'm really tired of running over and having him check out the latest and greatest achievements from the Open Source community, just to have him yawn and produce a list of lacking features and quality. It's making me look bad dammit!!!
But in seriousness, this is great, just as I applaud every release of GIMP, GNOME, KDE and many of the other awesome projects that make using UNIX systems easier, I really must produce a sober reminder that we still aren't the best, or even in running for the top spot, when it comes to quality and richness of features in multimedia stuff.
These are the same reasons that Windows never won over the graphics market (surprise, it wasn't just fanaticism), so we really can't feel bad, the bar is that high.
I hope that one day soon my graphics developer will thank me when I put Yellow Dog or LinuxPPC on his G4. I've already got it on my 1999 PowerBook (did I mention Apple makes great hardware)
So thanks for everyones hard work, it's looking like a great start.
Arrogance is Confidence which lacks integrity. -- me
While the posting I am responding to was an absurd troll, it's possible that someone might take it seriously, so I'll respond to be on the safe side.
... you get the idea. There's nothing new about DVD's that innately requires the manufacturer's rights to expand and the consumers' rights to be more restricted -- they're just taking advantage of a shift in technology to attempt to create new rights for themselves. And since those rights are based on trade secrets and not legal rights, it's just fine for people to counter that effort.
Once you buy a DVD, you own it and, and of course you have the right to view it. Of course, all rights must be balanced against other rights (e.g. freedom of assembly can be regulated to ensure public safety). It's absurd to compare playing a DVD you've purchased to shooting your own children.
The issues you raise about "script kiddies threatening the format" are off-base. DVD's can be copied without decrypting them, simply by duplicating them, and in fact well before CSS was cracked DVD's were widely pirated outside of the US because it's so easy (and DVD's are relatively overpriced compared to manufacturing costs). The only thing that encrypting DVD's does is make it difficult to produce a DVD player that doesn't enforce the region coding and licensing fees, and create all sorts of hassles for consumers of the sort that killed off the DAT format (where you often couldn't even copy your own personal recordings).
Keep in mind that many other media formats have succeeded without any encryption: radio, TV, newspapers, books, CD's, LP's, cassette tapes, VHS, laserdisk