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DVD Playback In FreeBSD
LiquidPC writes "ONLamp.com has a new article on DVD playback in FreeBSD. It goes over setting up your system for optimal DVD playback, and describes how to install and use many of the DVD players that are in the FreeBSD ports collection."
Clicked submit just a tad bit early. :)
:P
Mplayer works fine for me, and it also supports more of the win32 codecs. This really helps when viewing mpegs and avis off the net. In fact under unix with the win32 codecs mplayer is your best bet.
I suspect the reason he had a hard time making it work was because he did not use the -fs (full screen) options.
Playing video in a maximized x-window isn't usually the most efficient thing to do. I only have a pentium 3 and mplayer plays DVDs perfetly when I use the -fs option.
Wow, this post is more informative then the entire freaking article above
Yup, I've been using mplayer for a good while now. Switched from xine, because of the recent problems xine has with DivX.
I've played with the aalib (ASCII art) viewer, and it's amazing! A little tweaking of the brightness/contrast is recommended, but the detail is great!
So, here's a few tricks I've picked up that I'll share:
Okay, now that that's done, do you want to watch DVDs while you work? If you use Xv (or something similar), there's a lot of things you can do, depending on your choice of apps. (Use 'xvinfo' to see if Xv is on your system.) I won't post them all here, but the key is to turn the background color to the same color as the Xv key color. You then can use xine with '-rootwin -fs', and watch your movie as a background.
That said, the trick is finding out what that key color is; it's not even always the same between reboots, and the number that 'xvinfo' reports is a color index, not an RGB value.
You can use gimp and do a screen capture of a playing movie to get the correct RGB value, so you can put that into a color config. But that's not fun, and you may have to change it after the next reboot.
So, to anybody who emails me at piquan.piqnet@org (you fix it up), I'll gladly send a short program to set the Xv key color to something predetermined. (I use #0804f6, which lets you make color schemes that are viewable with or without movies playing.) Then you can set your app's background color and work while you watch.
I also have schemes or libraries to do this for the following:
I'll gladly share these too; just drop me an email.
Be sure that your app's window doesn't take up quite the whole screen, though, or the movie will be cropped to a bounding rectangle of what it thinks is visible. I'm still looking for a way to inhibit that behavior, but meanwhile, just leave a thin strip of pixels along the bottom and right when you resize a window.
By the way, none of the information in this post is BSD-specific. All this stuff should work on other Unices too, if you're forced to use one. The transparencies work with other viewers, but I find mplayer works best.
I even took some screenshots of the movie I was watching at the time: Planet of the Apes. Ogle worked great and included chapter support.
Unfortunately, there was a kernel bug and depending on the DVD, the kernel would panic.
However, I'm tempted to try Ogle again sometime soon.
I agree with most of what you say, except I'll nitpick on one thing:
And Mplayer doesn't seek in an incomplete DivX file...
That's what I thought too, until I discovered the -idx option. Yes, man pages are useful sometimes :-)