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.

Comments

Re:DVD Players for Linux

[IamTheRealMike]

Sure, it took a little bit of effort but not too much.

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 :)

Television Looks Like Shit, Hi-Res Monitors Don't

[FreeUser]

... 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.