Playing DVDs

[drhowarddrfine]

It's been a while since I tried playing DVDs with FreeBSD but another Windows upgrader gave me (for free, of course) their box with a DVD player so I want to try and get software to play it. I briefly attempted this with mplayer on another box a few days ago and had only limited success. I think I would like to just use mplayer but have no solid reason except I never could get vlc to work right (again just trying it for a short time).

So before I start down this path, I'm just wondering if there are any gotchas I need to be aware of and any handy tutorials there might be, other than the handbook or mplayer's docs. Or will someone really want to talk me out of using mplayer?

I'm asking since I've never gotten anything to work 100% with DVDs though mplayer has worked with downloaded multimedia just fine. I'll be playing owned DVDs and Netflix stuff mostly.

[hydra]

gmplayer, vlc, ogle...

[Oliver_H]

>I'm asking since I've never gotten anything to work 100% with DVDs though mplayer has worked with downloaded multimedia just fine.

Make sure you have Mplayer build with libdvdcss, without it you're unable to decrypt the media.

[BSDfan666]

It depends on the specifications of your computer, I use ogle.. VLC sometimes, xine/mplayer perform poorly on my systems for some reason.

[BSDKaffee]

The bad thing about MPlayer is that it doesn't support DVD menus. You are on your own trying to figure out which title goes to what. Normally the main feature is Title 1, but that's not always the case. Xine and Ogle do support menus. Ogle doesn't support deinterlacing though.

[BSDfan666]

Originally Posted by BSDKaffee

Ogle doesn't support deinterlacing though.

That's why I cross my fingers when I rent a DVD, "Please be 480p, Please!"

It would be nice if movies actually had a notice mentioning if they were 480p or 480i.

You may notice, I refuse to use HDTV/HDDVD/Blu-Ray..

[drhowarddrfine]

I thought gmplayer supports menus.
Without deinterlacing in ogle, is it just that you can see the interlacing during playback? How bad is it?

[BSDfan666]

Originally Posted by drhowarddrfine

I thought gmplayer supports menus.
Without deinterlacing in ogle, is it just that you can see the interlacing during playback? How bad is it?

It depends, I've watched a few movies from start to finish... you just see the frames flicker now and again.

[Oliver_H]

Originally Posted by BSDKaffee

The bad thing about MPlayer is that it doesn't support DVD menus. You are on your own trying to figure out which title goes to what. Normally the main feature is Title 1, but that's not always the case. Xine and Ogle do support menus. Ogle doesn't support deinterlacing though.

You have to compile MPlayer with libdvdnav,

http://www.mplayerhq.hu/design7/news.html

but the one in FreeBSD is rather old,

http://www.freshports.org/multimedia/libdvdnav/

[drhowarddrfine]

Do you know if the version of libdvdnav from mplayer's site works with fbsd?