[Preston] dvd playing under linux

[Kevin Golding]

I have been playing DVD's under Linux for about a year
now, and my gut feel says it's about 95% there.

The performance (speed) is good, but make sure you
have right video drivers for your card. Often you have
to download special X drivers from card manufacturers
website. Running with the Xv(??) video extensions for
X makes a huge difference to playback performance.

Stability is mostly ok. For me this has caused some
problems. Sometimes when watching a movie I start
getting lots of read errors, performance goes to pot
for a while, then it basically drops out. I thought
that this was scratches on the disk, but sometimes
more scratched disks will play ok will an almost new
one will have problems. Maybe this is some sort of bug
in the DVD filesystem/reading/decrypting software?
It's a problem on, say, 1 in 20 disks, so is annoying
but not a huge problem.

When you say missing bells and whistles like menus, do
you mean the intro screens that come on the DVD, or a
nice gui with play/stop/etc buttons? I use ogle, and
all the movies intro screens with language selection
etc work just fine. As far as gui's go, I prefer to
watch the movie in full screen mode anyway, so any
sort of gui eye candy would be an unwanted intrusion.
I use the keyboard for all the play/pause commands.

On the plus side, you get more flexibility. No more
zoning restrictions, so if you have bought any DVD's
overseas they will play. Whilst not condoning or
promoting copyright infringement, it is possible to
save DVD's to hard disk to watch later. For example,
hire an overnight DVD from video shop, have a few too
many pints at pub on way home. Decide too tired to
watch movie tonight, so make a copy on hard disk, take
DVD back in the morning, and watch movie tomorrow
night (then delete it afterwards of course).

In summary, if you have no alternative, it is a
workable solution. If you prefer Linux as a matter of
principle, it is a workable solution. But much of the
time I still find it easier to just boot Windows and
watch in that.


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