Recommend DVD player?

[Steve Snyder]

Can someone recommend a stable DVD player to run on my RedHat v7.2 box? My video is a G400, if that matters.

Thanks.

[leech]

OGLE Best DVD Player around for linux. Supports everything.

http://www.dtek.chalmers.se/groups/dvd/

Most DVD players I've tried on linux have problems with one thing or another, but Ogle works great for me. As it says on the website "the RPMs have been reported to work on Redhat 7.0 and 7.1, Mandrake 7.1, 8.0 and 8.1. Of course they have sources on there as well. Hopefully you like the GTK widgets, because that's what it uses. The only limitations are;


* Reverse play and search slider not implemented.
* No chapter drop down menu.
* No angle selection during playback (angle selection in DVD menu works).
* No closed caption support (not the same as subpicture subtitling).
* PCM and DTS audio not supported.
* To play another DVD you have to restart the program.
* Karaoke mode is missing.


Best of luck. Another good one, (though I've never been able to get the navigation part working right) is Xine at http://xine.sourceforge.net. The other one that is working pretty well is videolan client. http://www.videolan.org

Good luck, and happy viewing.

Leech

[Wombat]

I've been using videolan. The only thing that I don't have working is AC3 output, but that's Dolby & Creative's fault, not one of the programmers.

Xine has tons of potential. Don't know much about OGLE.

[leech]

Have they added in navigation of the menus? So that you can access the extras, etc.. Ogle was the only one out of the three that I tried that worked flawlessly on this. Xine had a lot of problems in where exactly the buttons were, and videolan (last time I tried it) didn't have any support at all for that, though it had chapter selection.

Leech

[Ees]

If you're running Redhat, see freshrpms.net for regularly updated RPMs of the above.

Martin

[jImbEam]

I have had good luck on my SuSE 7.1 sustem with xine with the navigation plugin (works for me).
Xine


Speaking of dvd players, Xine is supposed to support something called the Teletux driver
that used something called syncfb for G400/G200. Does anyone have information on what this is or if it is worth trying to get working?

Thanks.

jImbEam

[leech]

I always thought that teletext was something for TV viewers. I think for the subtitles mainly, but of course I could be wrong.

Leech

[jImbEam]

A bit from the README.syncfb:

This XINE video output plugin uses the so called Teletux driver which provides special hardware features of the Matrox G400 and G200 cards like deinterlacing, scaling and YUV data to RGB conversion --- just to name a few. The plugin makes all those features available to XINE and because all this tasks are done by the graphics card there is no need for XINE to do them in software -- so you save precious CPU time which you may gonna need for other things. :-)

Another feature of this plugin is the synchronisation of the video picture with the refresh of your screen. Before you ask why you would need that - here the explanation...

In order to have an optimal DVD playback the update of the image needs to be syncronized with the vertical refresh of the screen. Otherwise you will sometimes see part of frame n and part of frame n+1 during playback of a movie. Resulting in tearing artefacts on moving objects.

When using this plugin the update of the screen is done during the vertical retrace of your monitor and those tearing artefacts are gone forever.

And last but not least, you can finally use hardware deinterlacing, so your CPU can lean back and let the graphic card do the work.

That sound like something I want. I figured someone here might of tried it.


jImbEam

[dZeus]

hmmm... according to MPlayer documentation syncfb is outdated by Xv. Though I've tried to install syncfb, but it won't compile

currently I'm playing with the framebuffer support in the latest kernels and matroxset + fbset utils.

[jImbEam]

I could not get it to work either, oh well, Xv works good.

jImbEam

[dZeus]

just to bring up this old subject again...

MPlayer + mga_vid (which comes with the MPlayer source package) plain ROCKS!!!!

I can decode MPEG2 on a Celeron 333 + G400, output it to the TV-Out and only use 80 percent cpu time

DivX also works without a problem, using 40-80% cpu time (and according to the manual even less if I would use the DivX 4.0 directshow filter instead of the hacked ms mpeg4v3 one (divx_c32.ax).

MPlayer just plain rocks!!! and it doesn't even need X thus saving a lot of overhead!

the only thing I need to do is to get some good fbset modes for tv-out (720x480@59.94Hz in full overscan on the tv for NTSC and 720x576@50Hz in full overscan mode for PAL).... if I would get good modes for these 2 settings, then I would be in heaven