What "lite" DVD playback software is out there?

Fenster

I'm having problems with DVD playback on my laptop so I'm looking for a "lite" alternative. Xine is slow, choppy and leaks memory like a sieve at the best of times. Twice I've had to kill X entirely to kill the program. I can coax mplayer into playing a video on a DVD, but only one. Thereafter I get messages warning me the DVD is encrpyted.On top of that, no amount of coaxing has allowed me to resize the mplayer image size (not to mention mplayer's problems with menus).

So uh, has anyone suggestions?

Vikings

I'm also looking for a dvd player for mandrive 2005 le.i586 or something like that. (I panicked and got rid of fedora because i was too lazy! Mandriva is much easier to use even if it takes forever to boot/shut down!)

Ste-

Have you tried Videolan ?
http://www.videolan.org/vlc/

As for the encrytped DVD with mplayer, do you have libcss ? I think that's the correct lib.

Vikings

Use vlc on my pc here with windows, will try it on laptop later.

I take it i cant install powerdvd on it? (linux noob here).

Ste-

IncredibleBulk wrote:

Use vlc on my pc here with windows, will try it on laptop later.

I take it i cant install powerdvd on it? (linux noob here).

PowerDVD does have a Linux version but I've yet to see it.
Tbh I've had no problems using mplayer or xine or vlc to play DVD's when I was in Linux.

Fenster

IncredibleBulk wrote:

Use vlc on my pc here with windows, will try it on laptop later.

I take it i cant install powerdvd on it? (linux noob here).

Nah, Power DVD doesn't have a native Linux port and I shudder at the thought of DVD playback with it through Wine.

Besides that, it has some weird "copyright protection" features such as trying to region-lock my player and a refusal to begin playback if I'm using my TV out.

Stark

I find Totem to be great. It can act as a front-end to either xine(I find it much more reliable than xine-ui) or Gstreamer.

rsynnott

You'll be wanting DeCSS for mplayer to do DVDs. Google; it should be easy to find a package for your distro.

nadir

tbh, mplayer is the best, you wont find anything more light weight, have you compiled it with mmx flags? and sse ?
also you should be able to scale the image and basically do anything.
Give me some more info and ill see if I can help

Rambo

OGLE is the DVD player I use because it supports all the DVD menus

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

Fenster

nadir wrote:

tbh, mplayer is the best, you wont find anything more light weight, have you compiled it with mmx flags? and sse ?
also you should be able to scale the image and basically do anything.
Give me some more info and ill see if I can help

I'm trying that now. I also tracked down the playback problem on my laptop. The xorg Radeon driver is missing a function (sorry, don't have the name on hand now) required for proper DVD playback, so it goes to crap once I start playing.

Of course, ATI has piss-poor Linux support, especially for the Mobility line of cards. Sorry, did I say piss-poor? I mean "non-exsistent."

For my make flags, I'm recompiling mplayer now on my desktop, with that flag:

CFLAGS="-O2 -march=i686 -fomit-frame-pointer"
CHOST="i686-pc-linux-gnu"
CXXFLAGS="${CFLAGS}"
USE='-kde gnome mmx qt gtk gtk2 pthreads imlib dvd dvdr alsa cdr'
ACCEPT_KEYWORDS="~x86"
MAKEOPTS='-j3'
ALSA_CARDS="cmipci"

nadir

yeah, that looks fine, it should work, Im mean at least, mplayer -vo xv
you could always try sdl output, bu really xv should work
if xv doesnt work, something is badly wrong.
us the error message , or whatever is causing problems
there is so much scaling support in mplayer, -fs -scale etc.
surely something will work.

L1011

Fenster wrote:

Nah, Power DVD doesn't have a native Linux port and I shudder at the thought of DVD playback with it through Wine.

Besides that, it has some weird "copyright protection" features such as trying to region-lock my player and a refusal to begin playback if I'm using my TV out.

No, PowerDVD DOES have a native Linux port. The same way that there is, in theory, native Linux shared libraries of the Windows Media 10 decoders.

They're in TurboLinux and I think Linspire, but no free distros.

nadir

sounds absolutely rediculous to me, that they would want to port commercial media software for linux based systems. Whats the point when you have ogle and xine.

Fenster

Linspire are turning into a "Walmart" distro. The put out a commerical distro with similarly commercial tools, for the average joe blogs. This ain't Gentoo.

However, its working for them, as Walmart are putting Linspire on a sub $500 laptop, and I believe they've made similar deals with companies in Asia.

L1011

nadir wrote:

sounds absolutely rediculous to me, that they would want to port commercial media software for linux based systems. Whats the point when you have ogle and xine.

Legality. Ogle, Xine, mplayer and vlc are all, yes, ALL, illegal in the US. The DVD decryption library breaks the DMCA, the MPEG2 decoding library has no patents paid on it, and so on

They're legal here, thankfully.

Also, TurboLinux's support of Windows Media is less buggy than the mplayer/xine way of thunking in the Windows codec dll's.

nadir

MYOB wrote:

Legality. Ogle, Xine, mplayer and vlc are all, yes, ALL, illegal in the US. The DVD decryption library breaks the DMCA, the MPEG2 decoding library has no patents paid on it, and so on

They're legal here, thankfully.

Also, TurboLinux's support of Windows Media is less buggy than the mplayer/xine way of thunking in the Windows codec dll's.

sucks to be american.

/me shakes fis at EU parliment over patents