Help: DVDs players and Linux

[Rogério Brito <rbrito@ime.usp.br>]

	Dear All,

	Last week, I bought myself a new DVD drive, an Asus E608,
	which is a RPC1 drive. Being a new technology for me, I only
	have two DVDs to play with it ("G3: Live in Concert" and Elvis
	Presley's comeback special).

	Of course, the first thing I did was to just compile a new
	2.4.7 (at the time) kernel with the new ioctl interface for
	DVDs for a sid install that I have.

	I started searching the Debian repositories for DVD players
	and I've found two players that seemed to do the job (reading
	their descriptions on their respective sites): xine and
	videolan (vlc).

	I installed everything and started watching the DVDs, but then
	I got two little surprises:

	1 - the DVD playback didn't include subtitles (I later tested
	    this on another movie that I rented at a local
	    Blockbuster), which are very important for me, since
	    English is not my first language and I can't understand it
	    very well (I can not even write correctly in English, much
	    less listen to people speaking it).

	2 - the DVD playback shows a lot of artifacts, especially
	    during fast-moving scenes, with the two players showing
	    the same problems.

	    The effect that I saw was that output of the DVD players
	    had an interlaced display: I saw the even lines not
	    aligned with the odd lines, which was a bit distracting.

	Unfortunately, using PowerDVD 2.x under Windows/98, everything
	run fine and the problems above didn't appear. So, I guess
	that the hardware is working fine.

	Reading through some sites, I discovered that Linux players
	have problems displaying subtitles in overlay mode (which I
	don't even know what means) and tried to run vlc without it,
	by invoking vlc (0.2.82) with the vlc_overlay option disabled
	(set to 0), but as soon as I opened the DVD (using the gnome
	plugin), it crashed with a segmentation fault. :-(

	Is this a known problem?

	Also, I have a question regarding zones: will I be able to
	watch DVDs without ever worrying about zones? Is it handled
	transparently by the drive (which ignores the zones -- or so
	I've been told)? Do xine or vlc take care of that or should I
	use a program to set the "current" region of the drive?

	I'm a little bit lost here with regards of DVDs and I'd
	appreciate any help.


	Thank you very much in advance, Roger...

P.S.: I'm using the latest versions of all programs from today's
update of sid.
-- 
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  Rogério Brito - rbrito@ime.usp.br - http://www.ime.usp.br/~rbrito/
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