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."

Umm, this was pretty lame.

[Vinum]

All the guy did was build a few ports and report his experiences with them. He spoke about doing complex tweaking with mplayer but he couldn't figure out how to do it right so he didn't even post exactly what he did.

He got lucky and found a program which worked without him having to tweak anything, he was happy, and then the end of the article.

Re:Umm, this was pretty lame. (Whoops)

[Vinum]

Clicked submit just a tad bit early. :)

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 :P

Re:Umm, this was pretty lame. (Whoops)

[xA40D]

Mplayer works fine for me

Ditto.

Have you ever tried the ASCII codec?

'tis a foolish thing, but funny.

Re:Umm, this was pretty lame. (Whoops)

[Piquan]

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:

• With DVDs, caching is pretty well mandatory. It doesn't hurt for anything else.
• Use double buffering when available.
• Turn on frame drops.
• Here's a bit for your ~/.mplayer/config to turn these on: framedrop=yes cache=32768 double=1
• If you see interlacing problems on DVD playback, turn on a de-interlacer. Interlacing shows up as horizontal "blinds" when something moves quickly. Turn on a de-interlacer with "-vop pp -npp md,de". (This turns on a few other video processing options too.) See "mplayer -vop pp -npp help" for a list of other options to npp that can be useful.

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:

• KDE (If you use the KDE theme, it also affects Motif and Xaw apps).
• Mozilla
• Emacs
• Konsole

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.

Re:Umm, this was pretty lame. (Whoops)

[evilviper]

MPlayer is anything but perfect.

It would be nice to switch from fullscreen to windowed modes without restarting the app.

A better pause/slow/frame advance method would be good.

And Mplayer doesn't seek in an incomplete DivX file...

All those are things that avifile can do that MPlayer can't. Of course, avifile has it's own shortcommings.

Re:Umm, this was pretty lame. (Whoops)

[flynn_nrg]

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 :-)

Re:Umm, this was pretty lame. (Whoops)

[fmayhar]

You can switch between fullscreen and windowed mode in mplayer with the "f" key. Or by using the GUI, but real programmers don't use GUIs, right?

I use mplayer on FreeBSD (now up to 4.7-stable) all the time. It seems to be the best all-around viewer, and the only one that will reliably work on my PII/400 laptop (Dell Inspiron 3500; hey, I can watch movies on it, what more do I need?).

Re:Umm, this was pretty lame. (Whoops)

[evilviper]

You can switch between fullscreen and windowed mode in mplayer with the "f" key.

You might think so... I have (just now, actually) personally verified that it doesn't work. Start it up in windowed or fullscreen mode, and "f" doesn't do a thing. And, it doesn't mention anything in the man page.

Yes, I realize that newer versions may have these features that I've mentioned... but the complaints were quite valid from around the time I posted this, and for quite a long time before that as well.

Re:Umm, this was pretty lame. (Whoops)

[brad-x]

MPlayer really does rock. About the only issue I had with it was XVideo being an iffy proposition with the 'nv' XFree86 driver - if mplayer crashed, it would lock the hardware. Bad news.

A bit of tweaking and use of SDL video output though, and I haven't seen a problem since. Apparently it will also play QuickTime movies, but I've not confirmed this just yet.

Re:Nice going

[evilviper]

DVD playback has worked on BSD ever since it worked on Linux.

Same goes for the "ATI Rage 128" which I happen to be using right now myself.

I used Ogle back in FreeBSD-4.5 days

[smnolde]

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.

Newbies shouldn't write articles

[airgee]

Well, this article isn't very well written, all this guy done was installing a few ports and checking whithout reading anything about the particular port if he could play a DVD out of the box.
I would says that this is someone with a Windows-user mentality (run & click everywhere, huh, it doesn't work, huh, to the waste-bin, or huh, where's the gui, huh, to the waste-bin).

All in all, this isn't a really helpful article :-/

Uhh, brainwashed?

[Anonymous Coward]

Since movies are released at different times in different areas of the world, region codes are used to discourage the sale of DVDs before a region's official release date.

Uhh, please. That's just a nice bonus. The primary use of region codes is to have different prices in different markets.

Almost all DVDs are encrypted to prevent users from creating illegal copies

Right. The encryption has nothing to do with controlling the format and players to prevent people from using their legally bought DVDs the way they want to.

I'm trying to figure out how someone who uses FreeBSD is stupid enough to fall for the MPAA's party line. Somebody enlighten me...

It really wasn't difficult at all...

[rdewalt]

I've done it with minimal effort ever since 4.2

Install VLC,
Symlink /dev/dvd to the proper points

Mount the DVD disk
Run VLC

Supports everything I need it to do. Menus, playback is flawless.

(1ghz Athlon, 512M ram, GeForce MX200 card "Creative Labs Dxr2" DVD kit. (Does not use the DXR2 player, runs in software)

Mplayer has advantages over vlc, however, I've found vlc to be superior for DVD. mplayer is better for pretty much all the other formats I use.

DMCA

[DRnetman86]

What I'd like to know is if FreeBSD DVD playback violates the DMCA, like watching DVDs in Linux and everything else seems to do these days.