Re: Help: DVDs players and Linux
On Aug 13 2001, Rogério Brito wrote:
> Last week, I bought myself a new DVD drive, an Asus E608,
> which is a RPC1 drive.
(...)
I have described some of my experiences with DVD playing under
Linux at http://www.ime.usp.br/~rbrito/diary/.
Below are the relevant bits, sent to the list for archives and
reference purposes. I'd appreciate if anybody corrected any of
my errors and had any suggestions. Please feel free to comment
on anything.
(BTW, as a side comment, both of my posts to this list
regarding DVDs in the last month received almost no responses,
a very curious fact -- is it an indication that people are not
using DVDs with Linux? Why? Aren't people satisfied with the
results?)
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(...)
I have also bought myself an Asus DVD-ROM E608, which is an RPC-1 drive
that reads up to 8x. It is cool to have a DVD drive that ignores all the
region cruft established by the MPAA. Thus, now I can play all DVDs of my
preferred bands... Almost!
DVD support under Linux is way behind DVD support under Windows.
Cyberlink's PowerDVD generates quite smooth movies with the hardware that I
have (and I don't even know if it uses the Matrox in any way to accelerate
the output).
On the other hand, there are many programs to play DVDs under Linux, with
some of them bein Xine, Videolan and Ogle. All of them quite immature as
the time of this writing and there's also the whole problem with CSS.
Xine is packaged for Debian, but the package is quite old in the Debian
repository. It also does not incorportate DeCSS. It does not interpret DVD
menus. And subtitles bring the player down to its knees (is it disabling
overlay mode?). It can play the subtitles using the little controls at the
side of the "off" word. A command line option to use subtitles is available
on version 0.4.3.
On the other hand, only Videolan supports DeCSS out of the box, has Debian
packages on its site, but also has problems with subtitles (they are not
available in overlay mode -- only usable using command line switches --vout
x11 or or --vout sdl). Videolan's subtitles are ugly. Overall, it seems to
be a player with a good potential and better user interface than xine.
Last, ogle is the only player that supports DVD menus. I haven't used it as
much as the other ones, but not all DVD menus are usable (ogle sometimes
skips menus). It seems that the future of this player is just to serve to
other players as a source for menu-handling.
The DVD output on Linux is also quite bad: the video shows clear signs of
being interlaced, with, say, odd lines shifted to the right some 10-20
pixels in relation to even lines. This artifact is especially bad on
fast-moving scenes. Since this is a problem with all players under Linux,
is there any library that is doing something wrong? PowerDVD for Windows is
also not perfect: the image is not as crisp as I'd expect from a DVD: while
it doesn't show the effects just mentioned above, its image is a bit
blurred, like if someone used a "gaussian blur" filter on the image.
Anyway, I still don't know how things are handled with regions under Linux:
are region codes simply ignored by both the drive and the application? Is
the application (say, xine) responsible for setting it/lying to the drive?
Shouldn't I care? It seems that I'll have to use that dreaded
trial-and-error again to discover. Humpft.
(...)
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[]s, Roger...
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Rogério Brito - rbrito@ime.usp.br - http://www.ime.usp.br/~rbrito/
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