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Linux DVD Players Reviewed
Anonymous Coward writes "Linux Journal have posted a review of DVD players on their site. Interesting review, that covers most of the main players, although there are a few minor errors." I've
settled on Xine since it does most of the divx, wmv, and mpegs I want to see. If
it just did Sorenson QT, it'd be perfect.
For some reason mplayer doesn't seem to get too much press. But honestly, it is easily the best one..
At the moment it is easily the fastest (I know; I have a p500, and the speed difference between it and many others (I've tried way more than this review) is incredible), and development is very fast at the moment (xine is rather stagnant). The team is working hard at getting core features down before they hit the frills. Some people may argue that all the optimizations aren't supposed to be considered core issues, but screw that. I want smooth DVD playback!!
At this moment they have lots of amazing features like mencoder, which is a related video encoding project, vidix output (their own hardware accelerated video output, which is blazing fast), support for many many file types, and the speed is incredible.
Some gripes people have had, for instance (a) wasn't GPL and (b) binaries need to be compiled on a specific machine for optimization--both are moot points now! They are now fully GPL and are moving all the optimization to runtime configurable rather than compile-time defined (they are very far along with this). You should expect official packages to enter all distributions soon.
Really, it's an amazing project. They catch some flak, but honestly, it performs very well, and is going to get even better! Once the core has stabilized they will polish up all the outside stuff.
First step : run Xine. Oh, except it sucks, because the version packaged with my distro is several months old. Watch out for this.
Second step: uninstall current Xine, go to the Xine homepage, and install the latest version. You may need either the tarball like I did, or there may be an RPM for you.
Third step: look in the links section at the bottom for CaptainCSS, download it, follow the instructions carefully, as they are non-standard, and you will have a fully working DVD player.
Final step: remember to click the D4D button rather than the DVD button.
Oh ... actual final step: curse the MPAA for making your life harder than it needs to be. Yes, DVD encryption sucks, but I won't go into why here, there are plenty of other /. stories that cover that. Anyway, that should get you going. If you get stuck, then try opening a ticket at protonic :)
... even with the same video signal. Whoever modded the parent post up as "insightful" has shit for brains.
In answer to the question posted: Why not just get an el cheapo dvd standalone unit for your TV. You get a remote and probably a bigger picture. Why would anyone watch DVDs on their computer, Gnu/Linux or Windows?
Television looks like shit. It is interlaced, with only 480 lines of resolution (NTSC) or 576 lines (PAL). This means that each stroke of the electronic pen only writes 240 lines (288 lines PAL) per stroke, with each stroke happening 60 times / second (50 times / second PAL). In short, the image is low res, flickery, and fuzzy.
Contrast that with a 1920x1200 24" LCD monitor, which can play DVDs in progressive, rather than interlaced mode (meaning each swipe of the electronic pen across the screen, 60 times each second, writes all 480 [PAL: 576] lines, rather than just have of them), and can do so at resolutions most consumer televisions simply cannot match, such as 720p.
Hell, you can take analog video signals, captured with either V4L(1|2) or firewire, encode and compress them into xvid format, and have a better picture than the TV was capable of displaying during the live broadcast. I know. I've done this with two episodes of Max Headroom, with astonishing results. Even my old 8-mm college videos (not hi-8 mind you, just 8-mm video tape) looks better after it has been digitized, deinterlaced, and displayed on a computer monitor than it does fresh from the master source displayed on the same monitor (but still interlaced), much less the low res television.
Then there are all kinds of scaling issues involved when trying to use consumer DVD players with high quality monitors or plasma screens, so much so that many videophiles build HTPCs (Home Theatre PCs) in order to fix the scaling artifacts and achieve better quality output than is possible even if spending tens of thousands of dollars on specialized scan converters and scaler hardware designed to do the very same thing.
The general purpose computer is the best A/V display device available to normal people today, and will remain so for the forseeable future, unless congress decides normal folks shouldn't be allowed to possess the power of a home computer and passes the Hollings Bill or some variant thereof, in which case it is time to emigrate.
The Future of Human Evolution: Autonomy
mplayer and xine work ok. My favorite is ogle, as it is the most complete dvd support you will find. vlc (video lan client) I have heard also works well. non-ogle players typically take a long time to wade through css encryption when present, and has better sdupport for dvd menus (dvdnav works mostly, but still has a few issues compared to ogle.
XML is like violence. If it doesn't solve the problem, use more.
From the article:
Xine only supports the playback of unencrypted DVD directly, but support for encrypted DVDs is provided by a third-party plugin (xine_d4d_plugin).
...
Unfortunately, Xine does not support DVD menus directly; however, there is a plugin called dvdnav (available from prdownloads.sourceforge.net/dvd) that adds this functionality to Xine. This plugin is a must-have if you intend to use Xine for DVD playback
Actually, the current recommended way to play all DVDs, encrypted and unencrypted, is with dvdnav. If you have installed libdvdcss (preferably the one available at the Ogle web site, I believe), dvdnav will recognize it and use it.
The xine_d4d_plugin isn't maintained well and doesn't work at all with the latest versions of Xine, AFAIK. dvdnav is the better choice.
Note to ACs: I usually delete AC replies without reading them. If you want to talk to me, log in.
If you can decrypt CSS yourself, are you still affected by regions? Does the DVD player deny the whole disk or just access to the deecryption keys?
It depends.
Older DVD-ROM drives didn't do region checking themselves, and relied on the software player to do it. Obviously, none of the free players bother. All newer DVD-ROM drives, however, do the region checking in the hardware (well, firmware), and if the region code on the DVD doesn't match the code on the DVD-ROM then the drive will in fact refuse to give up any data. If you fopen() a file it will succeed, but fread() will return no data (IIRC, it's been a while since I looked). There are hacks for most of them that can fix this defect, however. In most cases this involves loading new firmware and you can download and install the update in a matter of minutes. Of course, you do risk ruining the drive if something goes wrong.
But that's not the whole answer, because there's a scripting language for DVDs (that's how they make all those interactive menus and games), and some DVDs implement some checking in this scripting language. Basically, the script queries the drive and asks it what region it is set to. If it answers anything other than the region the DVD is intended for then the script directs the player to show a "you can't play this" screen and to disable chapter selection, etc. controls so that you are stuck there.
Even *that's* not the end of the story, though, because it's the player that executes the interpreter that runs the scripts from the DVD, and in the case of open source players, the interpreters are open source as well. So, interpreter authors are trying to write interpreters that will second guess the scripts they're executing and refuse to honor the code that would lock you out.
Note to ACs: I usually delete AC replies without reading them. If you want to talk to me, log in.