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Linux DVD Player on a Bootable CD?
Kumar asks: "I'm
trying to make a bootable Linux CD with nothing more than XFree86 4
and ogle to play
DVDs. I'm trying to make it as simple as possible: boot the system,
change the CD, hit 'play'. If anyone has attempted anything like this
before I'd like to hear of their successes and/or any tips on
achieving this goal." A Linux box set up like this might make a
nice alternative to an expensive DVD player. Is anyone working on
something like this?
How could you possibly make a computer for under $99 (the price of DVD players I've seen at real, tangible stores) that would have the capacity to play dvds, in software mode, in linux? Riiiiight.
If the PC is already running Linux, then you don't need to go through all that. Obviously that isn't the case, because your question would be silly then :)
So, why not just get PowerDVD, or WinDVD? No rebooting. It probably even came bundled with your DVDROM drive - I know I have a few copies kicking around.
The only situation where the requirement makes sense that I can think of is that someone on a corporate network has a new PC with DVDROM, but isn't allowed to have DVD Player software installed, but that person is likely to not have access to the BIOS to allow CD-Booting, either.
"don't fall into the fallacy of believing that Perl can solve social problems. Maybe Perl 6 can, but that's a ways off"
have you people ever thought that he might already a system and NOT a DVD, which would be why this question was asked. I would start with LRP or slackware. Or even try and get that bootable ISO from simply GNUStep (though I believe the ISO is still not available for download)and add a DVD player to it. You would need just the basics. You might want to stick with CDRWs until you get it right.
Perhaps one of the embedded Linux distributions might help, they often have demo versions already tailored to run stripped down and "headless" etc.
This review of LynuxWorks' BlueCat Linux discusses some utilities ('mkrootfs' , 'mkkernel' and 'mkboot')that might help.
Hello... Excuse me... I'm sure Kumar knows you can buy DVD players fairly cheaply. That's not an answer to his question. Yeesh.
A good starting point might be the RedHat based SuperRescue ISO. It's got everything: drivers, networking (probably not necessary), XFree86, etc. Adding in a DVD player app and taking out the unnecessary bits probably wouldn't take long.
And as a side effect of this project, you could get quite a bit more space by using a DVD-R(W) disc, since a DVD drive is guaranteed to be available.
Why on earth would anyone build a PC to do something a piece of hardware can do cheaper and better? There's absolutely no point. If you want to do something "hacky", for fun, at least have it be something *useful*!
- A.P.
"Remember when the U.S. had a drug problem, and then we declared a War On Drugs, and now you can't buy drugs anymore?"
First, how to make a bootable Linux disk. Check out The BBLCD Toolkit, Bernhard's Bootable Linux CD or Build your own Bootable Linux CD, and of course the CD-Writing HOWTO. Do some searches on your favorite search engines for more information on making bootable Linux CDs.
Second, how to start X-windows and run a dedicated application on start up. Check out the Kiosk HOWTO for information on which scripts need to be modified (they talk about booting up netscape, but you'll get the idea). You should also become familiar with Linux and X-windows boot up sequence to find out which scripts need to be modified.
forget changing the disc, just plunk down a couple extra bucks for a second cdrom for the OS. Otherwise everything would have to be in RAM.
Are you to cheap to buy an old 1gig harddrive?
Check out demolinux.org. I was going to come up with a similar concept myself. I just wanted to have a portable linux system with some X Window capabilities to use on other people's computers and at work without having to muck with formatting other peoples hard drives. Though a boot floppy could give me a really basic linux system I wanted something with more tools. I came across the demolinux site in search of trying to see if anyone else had already come up with the concept. The demolinux site also has some links to pages that explain in a really rough and incomplete way how to go about building a live file system on a cdrom. I tried out the demolinux and of course it is really slow and pretty much unusable with only 64 megs of ram which is all I have on my test machine that I tested it on. But it does run and load on even just 64 megs of ram. The iso that I downloaded and burned onto a cdrom from the demolinux site runs a full version of KDE right off the cdrom. So you could literally run an entire linux system without the need for a hard drive! But of course for it to be practical you would need RAM coming out your arse to make it work well. But it's definitely doable. Basically to accomplish the DVD idea you would just use the same concepts that demolinux used to create their distro and strip it down and just add the bare essentials with of course DVD apps loaded. Hope this helps you out!
But can it play divx's as well? I thought not.
-- I speak only for myself.
if the system just has the 1 dvd / cd drive and you are using that to boot the thing, where do you put the dvd you want to play?
some people have no idea
look somewhere else for a sig... *** ** *
I am trying to build a similar Linux system. However, I would like to be able to play DVDs in my TV. I would like also to plug my satellite receiver in the system to use it as a TiVO like solution. The problem is that I am not able to find a video card with TV-Out supported on Linux. A large numbers of cards supported on Linux have TV output but this feature is not supported on Linux. The task becomes even harder if you try to find a card that has TV output and input support on Linux. I haven't started to look for software that would implement the TiVO solution yet but I've heard of a few projects like OpenPVR etc. Would any one of you guys know of good video cards and software that I could use in a solution like this? Have you guys tried to do the same? Any help would be appreciated.