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Linux Software

DVD for Linux 103

Posted by Hemos from the it's-coming dept.
platinum wrote to us with the news that folks at the Internationale Funkausstellung in Berlin are showing a board for Linux that will allow DVD under Linux. Specs for the board are on the site, and the board should be availible towards the end of the year-December, probably.
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DVD for Linux More

DVD for Linux

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  • Actually I think the dxr3 *IS* a Hollywood+. I forget the exact model number though.
  • After seeing a hardware decoded DVD movie in 1280x1024 on my 17" Trinitron monitor, TV can kiss my... posterior regions. If you enjoy movies for both content and visual appearance, a normal television is not the way to go.
  • I wrote to them and they replied saying something like, "we would like to support linux but current contracts with prevent us from doing so. we are currently looking into the legal issues, and if possible we will consider writing a driver." IOW, "we're not supporting it now, and probally never will." Sigma has said that their next board will support linux. Their current one can't because the css/decryption is done in software and they are worried us big bad linux haxorz will be able to crack css, oops we already did.
  • Exactly. Right now I'm wondering if I should go with the $6000 wireless to get my friend's dorm connected to ours, or just buy a 37 inch monitor.
    http://www.bombcar.com It's where it is at.
  • Linux has prelim (dev) support for USB in 2.3.x; (2.3.16 being the latest as of this post).

    check out The Linux USB page (http://www.linux-usb.org/) [linux-usb.org] for info on USB and Linux.



    https://www.mav.net/teddyr/syousif/ [mav.net]
  • I wrote Sigma a few weeks back and that's exactly what they told me, that they are "currently discussing Linux support in a future product.." glad I only spent $55 on my Sigma Decoder, which, btw, kicks ass (but only in windoze :( ). Not content to sit in front of my computer to watch DVD, I bought a 27" trinitron TV to feed my nasty DSS/DVD habit. I have complete faith in sigma's ability to create a quality product for Linux (they've done a fine job for windows thus far) and I'm willing to wait for a GOOD product for linux, rather than a quickie.
  • my bad, I forgot to mention that and DVD's I watch on my new TV are STILL decoded on the PC, as Sigma's (and subsequently Creative's) S-Video and Dolby out are quite nice.
  • I have both an ATI Rage Fury and a Sigma Designs Hollywood plus. The Hollywood plus is a PCI card that uses VGA pass through for your PC, or SVideo out. There is also several 3rd party hacks that will let you set the card up just about anyway you want. Very similar in features to the announced Linux Card, and it already exists.

    I'm just wondering why no one has looked at developing Linux drivers for the Hollywood Plus, since you can get one from several on line sources for less than $100.00 US.

    Just MHO.
  • Oh I fully intend to check out vmware when I get a new computer. I was going to get it for the current one but I was told it was a little too under powered to run vmware at a tolerable level. (Current computer is a Pentium [no pro, II or III just the plain original]) 166. However, I still may need to dual boot if vmware doesn't work as expected.

    The new computer will be better suited for multi-media applications. The Pentium should make a great fileserver.

    Thanks for the suggestion though. The advice is appreciated.

  • Goto Freshmeat and look for GATOS

    It rocks.. it works with almost all ATI cards that have TV support

    ChiefArcher
  • *I* really want a light portable video solution, here are the solution I come across:

    1)dvd player +2.2" CASIO TV (yes, 2.2 is fine by me the one I have has 600,000+ pixel. I really bought this for the baseball playoff.)
    $500+100

    2) dvd +Sony Glasstron! simulates 38" screen in front of your eyes! 500+500, too rich for my blood, also I was turn off by mix review of glasstron (can't view too long; some people can't use it; LOOK LIKR AN ALIEN IN NEW YORK SUBWAY --why can't Sony make a rayband style glass?)

    3) My libretto + portable 2X dvd and a PCMCIA card, I only need to invest 500 more.

    This is a very good solution, one thing that stops me is the DVD price. I watch a lot of movie every week, I have like 7 video rental cards in my pocket and I know all about their discount policy. For DVD rental I had to feed 3.7 to blockbuster. (there is another thing is that I really want to catch all the "Law and Order" and I don't believe the old movies I'm renting form the central libriry has release in DVD format yet.)

    4) So I finally find out this dream solution. It's light, this flexible, it can tape tv and movie in incredible resolution and brother, I can't afford it.
    http://bhphoto.com/video/sony%20prosumer/gvd300. html

    It cost at least 1200 but blow out dvd format. Well maybe I'll buy it in two years.

    5) Cheap bastard solution, a beat up used 8mm camcoder+ portable TV, but they all heeavy, so forget about it.

    have fun

  • Re:Linux hardware? (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward
    Golly, I don't know...

    Why don't you ask all companies making those lame WinModems?

    It is idiotic to direct peripheral hardware at a particular operating system, but it does occur. I hope this is Linux only just to show other companies up. Of course, since the drivers are open source it won't be long before somebody from the Windows community makes it work with the dreaded OS.

    I think that would be refreshing... a windows person having to hack a driver!
  • How does the tv output quality of this board compare to the Creative Encore kit?
  • Ahaha. No, the craze is with the BSDs but noone will tell you that. :D
    Rumor is that the programs will be user-level and not kernel-level, so i'll have noooo problem with them on my freebsd box and linux-compat.

    Why hasn't this been moderated down yet?
  • Just a little info here. I went to a guys house, who has a very expensive home theater setup (top of the line DVD, very expensive Line multiplier, three color ceiling mounted projector, Dolby....). He then proceeded to hook up a Video Card with the Impact TV chip on it (the one currently used by ATI, but this card was a pre ATI one) and hooked the PC directly up to the VGA port on the projector.

    Man, what an incredible experience. Very nearly as good as going to the theater itself, Certainly better than either TV or PC monitor. Full 16/9 projected on the wall across the room, no aliasing, not pixelation. Basically his sub $1000.00 PC was keeping up with over $30,000.00US of dedicated home theater equipment, as far as visual quality went.

    With the new ATI and other cards coming out, using your PC as the basis for a high quality projection system becomes viable, and desirable. All of this stuff is available today, not 2 years from now.

    Note: The new geForece 256 seems to have line multplication features built in, be interested to see how it will compare to the upcoming ATI home theater chip (aka ATI Rage 128 Pro).
  • There is already software to defeat the Hollywood plus, it's called Zone Selector, and it works great, and it's free.
  • The real reason is that the movie studio people, just like the music recording people, are technological idiots. It is possible to protect their intellectual property and still have a medium that's useful for people to store their own stuff.

    Their stupidity could ultimately hurt them more than plain piracy alone will. Piracy will always be around and someone will always find a way to get the intellectual property into a copyable medium. But if something other than a "copyright controllable" medium becomes popular in place of DVD, then the piracy will be larger than if they work to ensure that DVD is popular.

    I do know a way to make DVD protected. It would even work for the plain old CD except for the fact that CD players without the technology would not be able to play anything at all, so this would only be good for DVD. And no, I won't say how it is done. I have to protect my own intellectual property, ya know :-)
  • Actually I only have a 15" trinitron monitor shared between 2 PCs, my Faltmate has a 17" monitor. This plaes besides the 20" widescreen set in my bedroom and the 32" widescreen set in the lounge.

    Next up for the lunge is either projector, gas plasma or at a push a rear projection set (but I might have trouble getting something *that* big up the stair to the flat.

    M@t :o)
  • Damn straight! Just like many unfortunate souls I am constantly forced to use Win95 (*gasp*), yes its true...why you ask? Two reasons.

    The first is games and then only a select few (MechCommander, Shattered Light, and Diablo2 when it comes out). Even then I am currently in the process of getting these working under WINE.

    The second is DVD! If they are able to get this going under Linux, then I will finally have one more good reason not to bootup into that degenerate OS.

    I use StarOffice for work, I use Xanim/mtvp for viewing movies, X11amp and XMCD for music, Netscape for web-browsing, GIMP and XV for graphics, Xcdroast for duping and backups, lastly other small utilities for handling my network (firewall, IP masquerading, DHCP connection, etc.). I hope to god that I can add DVD to my list soon.

  • IIRC SuSE (six CDs and counting... :) already has their distro on a DVD...
    *snip*
    ...so I *could* just have been smoking some really good crack, but is there anybody out there who can confirm/deny?

    I guess I must have the same dealer as you then ;-) because I could swear I heard exactly the same thing; unfortunately I was also unable find any reference to it on their website, so I can't confirm it :-(

    chris
  • Yes the dxr3 is really just a relabeled Hollywood+ card. You can switch to the drivers from Sigma and it will still work fine. I'm currently using one right now from the Encore 6X kit and am very happy with the results. Looks great on my 19" Trinitron monitor and also on my crappy old 20" Toshiba TV.
  • But that doesn't decrypt the data on the disc, which means you can't reencode it as say a lower-quality CDR image. This is what they don't want broken and what they would be liable $1M for if they were negligent with, not the region coding.

  • pcmcia (Score:1)

    by whydna ( 9312 )
    Now all they need is a pcmcia model for us laptop users!!!
  • ...but is there any word on PCMCIA Decoders?

    ...and what about software-driven decoders?

    Also: Does anyone know of a PCMCIA Decoder/DVD-Interface on the same card? My laptop unfortunately only has one slot...

  • Re:Now I'm glad I waited (Score:3)

    by webslacker ( 15723 ) on Thursday September 02, 1999 @06:07AM (#1709568)
    I bought my computer with DVD, and after the first 2 months of playing scifi movies in the corner of my monitor nonstop, I hardly ever use it for movies now. However, one really nice thing about DVD drives is that because of its improved ability to read, it can read off of CDRW's and cheap, low-quality CDR's (the almost transparent kind) that regular CD-ROM drives may have trouble with.

    My advice is to get DVD. It's not much more expensive than a CD-ROM, and although you're probably not going to use the extra functionality all the time, it's nice to have it there when you want/need it.
  • I've been drooling over the possibility of a new computer for a while but I hadn't decided what type of video card to get or wether to stick to CDrom or try DVD.
    (The computer would dual boot between Linux and NT. There is still one program I'm stuck running on NT.)

    Now I'm glad I've waited a bit. I can wait a bit more for prices to come down and by that time this board should be released.

    This is very good news.

  • I've been waiting for a while to get DVD. If I had room I'd have got a standalone decoder, I've not got a builtin PC one mainly because of the drivers issues involved.

    I'll have to look around the shops around christmas time, might have some present requests :)

  • DVD is still a year or two away.. (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward
    I still think DVD is a couple of years away from being a dominant medium for anyting other than watching movies, and if I want to watch a movies I'll sit on a couch and watch it on TV not on my laptop, like the commericals keep showing. I mean when do you think you'll see a Linux(or Windows for that matter) distribution sold on DVD?
  • I'm gald to see that these guys are using the VideoForLinux2 [linux.org.uk] API in amongst this as I really hate to see a duplication of effort in what are minor applications. (Whatever any of you say Running DVD videos on a PC is pretty minor - most people - like myself will have a DVD deck to view DVDs on - I also have 2 DVD Rom drives and a creative labs DVD decoder board though ;o)

    One thing I would like to see is region independance - both the creative card and the DVD deck I have are region free since I ship DVDs in from the States due the the
    1. Crap prices in most UK stores (19ukp seems about average)
    2. Dreadful release timetable - we seem to get releases way after video and way way after America gets the DVDs.

    Out of insterest is there any legal requirement for these boards to support Macrovision - which I believe is only available as a licensed chipset - and if so is that a global requirement or is it per country?

  • Now if I can use my DVD under linux with my
    new Dell I7K (Hardware DVD of course)

  • Quit bitching to us about lack of driver support, and either:

    a) complain to the hardware manufacturers for ignoring a large portion of their userbase by not releasing non-windows/mac drivers or making specs available to the Free Software community.

    b) open up an editor and start coding some drivers for the parts that we do have specs for.

    c) go back to windows or mac


    BTW, USB is in the 2.3.x devel tree, which Linus has stated won't take near as long to go to 2.4.x (stable) as 2.1.x took. AFAIR, by the end of the year, if not sooner.
  • Try VMware for the program you're still using on NT. Further details can be found at www.vmware.com!
  • Right now you could make a copy of a CSS encrypted DVD. The problem is the cost of the media, IIRC dvd-ram discs go for about $50 a pop. It would simply be cheaper to buy the movie from some place like www.dvdexpress.com for about $20. Now when the encryption is cracked you might see people converting the MPEG2 streams to MPEG1 and creating VCDs off of DVDs.
  • I can see the benefit of DVD on a laptop, especially if you travel a lot. I can also see the benefit if you're a student living in a dorm room. Is there any other benefit? My TV is bigger than my computer monitor, my Panasonic DVD player works fine and fits better next to my TV than my computer would.
  • I'm wondering if you'll be able to disable macrovision or the region encoding on the board. I really hope you will be able to. Also, does anyone know anything about the on screen performance of this card? Does it produce a high quality image, or is it remnicant of the dxr2's image.
  • That's probably unlikely. The company would get in monetary trouble if the decryption was reverse-engineered from their software. This is one of the reasons no one wants to port their software players to Linux--they're afraid that it will be that much easier to figure them out. And after someone RE'd part of a Windows player (for the purpose of getting it working in Linux), they got even more scared. So the people who make the Hollywood+ card are, I believe, implementing decryption in hardware so they can release software drivers that don't contain the taboo information.
  • I have a Hollywood Plus Mpeg decoder card... Supposively, by the end of the year they'll have binary drivers/apps out... That's what the news groups seem to be telling people.. They're just anally slow about doing anything though... I love the card, but I'm really disappointed at the company itself.. Anyone working on drivers out there? /me needs to pick up C a little better.
  • Wait a minute. There is only enough information on a DVD to light up each scanline on a normal TV (except for Anamorphic widescreen, that's another matter). It looks much better on TV, I think. I guess it depends on if you have a hardware DVD decoder with an s-video (or better) out. I can't imagine what it would look like if it displayed on the VGA and then was converted to a TV signal (shudder). I have the usual Dxr2 board and it looks great on TV but crappy on the monitor. I would like to see software decoding on the monitor though, that might be OK.
  • Actually, if you read the whole page, you'll see close to the bottom that digital (I can't remembet whether it was optical or coax out) outputs is going to be included on the card. It has a regular output for Dolby Surround (just your regular headphone type jack...)

    Can't wait for DVD's on my Linux Box....
  • The dxr2 has an absolutely awful monitor display. I've seen software mpeg2 decoders that made the s-video tv output look like crap. I've heard the dxr3 looks a lot better.
  • Software decoders are problematic. There is prohibitive patenting on a couple of elements of DVD decoding, so you can't have a Free decoder. The people writing non-Free decoders aren't even considering writing for Linux.

    If the desktop Video4Linux-compatible hardware decoder sells well, I'm sure a PCMCIA version will follow soon. It costs much more to develop a PCMCIA card, though, so it's kinda understandible that they limited the risk by doing a desktop version first.

    ----
  • The drivers are going to be GPL'd so you could port it to whatever OS you wanted to. From what I understand the linux drivers will be released soon, sure you can't buy the card yet, but for the first time we might have drivers for linux before the hardware exists.
  • Someone from the windows community with microsoft's Driver Developement Kit, which IIRC is VERY expensive.
  • The DDK comes with an MSDN subscription, which costs roughly as much as a license for Troll Tech's Qt. This isn't expensive by any stretch. If a company making *hardware* doesn't have the budget to purchase even a DDK, I don't see any hope for them.
  • Funny thing, when did AMD, CYRIX, or Intel open source their hardware. OpenSource has a place, but OpenSource hardware is just silly. OpenSpec, okay, but OpenSource hadrware is dumb.
  • Acutally WinModems themselves are not lame, where else can you get a $10 56K modem. Them not porting drivers to BeOS, BSD and other OS is lame.
  • Well, for those of us (like me) who don't actually own a TV it's pretty good - I just wish there were more titles available for rental.

    Nick

  • that's why you get a laptop with a cool video out port... like the dell i7k. i just d/l the latest movies, play them full screen on the tv... chicks dig it... 'specially when the movie is still in the theaters (not that i support piracy..) >=)

  • ... (Score:3)

    by Signal 11 ( 7608 ) on Thursday September 02, 1999 @06:25AM (#1709605)
    December?! For the love of god, don't they know the world is going to come to an end at the end of this year?!

    --
  • There are some advantages actually. The TV show interlaced pictures, while the DVD content is non-interlaced, on a good monitor you will actually get a better (ie higher resolution) picture that on your TV. DVDs actually contain more information than your TV can produce. Also the computer can take advantage of "anamorphic" DVDs (the letter box picture is squished so that ther is no loss of information with the letterboxing (ie the black bars aren't part of the signal and the picture uses all available picture lines) but you need a widescreen format TV to actually see the benefit of this .. or a computer DVD drive)

    Hmm... Ive just convinced myself to go out & buy a DVD drive!

  • DDS3 (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward
    12GB per cart = 3 movies. Don't laff, people are already trading them.
  • My TV is bigger than my computer monitor

    My monitor is bigger than my TV, but then my "television" is an old 13" commie monitor (I just use it to watch videos). So my 17" monitor would be not too awful for watching DVD. Of course what I really want is a 16:9 aspect ratio monitor (35" of course, lets not think small), then I could watch movies as Buddha intended.
  • well, I'm a student. I also have a TV... I also don't want to pay the $200+ for a player that I would otherwise spend on food...

    I've been getting fairly desperate -- I'm about to start experimenting with WINE and software decoders, but I have this odd feeling that it's not going to work in the least...

    Lea
  • The hardware drivers are...Do you have any real need to have open sourced hardware? I'm sure none of your other computer hardware is...
  • It this a Linux only board? Or will it also work under BeOS, *BSD, etc?
  • I think most Slashdot readers have a monitor bigger than their TV set, if they bother owning a TV set at all, so I would think viewing DVD videos on a PC is hardly minor.
  • Why would a hardware company target a hardware product as being for a particular operating system? Make the best hardware you can, and then make drivers for everything (or release specs so others can)...
  • I'm going to have to get a few more PC card slots to hold all those darned PC Cards I need to get..... grrr.....
  • I've heard the dxr3 is MUCH better, but I've never seen it.
  • True, not expensive for a company, I meant for a windows hacker who wanted to write his own driver. Basically, if the company doesn't release windows drivers there is little chance of someone writing their own driver unless they already happen to have a copy of the DDK. Not to mention I don't think you can legally port a GPL'd driver to windows because of the DDK.
  • Only if you have a multi-region DVD player...
  • The only reason I still have Windows on any of my computers (the one with a DVD ROM) is so I can watch my DVDs, I would love to be able to get a Linux driver for my decoder board so I could completely eliminate Windows95. I could buy a stand alone viewer, but why waste the money when all I need is a driver. I like open source, however I know the driver could not legally be open source and would settle for just having a driver. I really don't want to buy another decoder board just to get a driver either. I have written Creative Labs (a responsible, non-incendary request), however they did not bother to respond to my letter.

    "Trouble is, just because it's obvious doesn't mean it's true"

  • Have to agree with you there. CDROM was a huge revolutionary leap in technology. On the other hand DVD is just a supliment technology. DVD gains users not from a real technical standpoint but from the fact that CDROM drives are being phased out. As long as you have programs and data sets that fit on a CDROM, CDROM disks and drives will still be useful(and much cheaper).


    As for DVD on Linux, that is great! DVD drives could be accessed through their drive interface(SCSI or IDE) so DVD drives are still useful. The big problem is the mpeg decoder hardware. Oh well...I'll just to use my dedicated, stand alone player to watch movies I guess. :-)

  • This spec seems odd. Most receivers/amplifiers use the 5.1 channel input/output. With Pro Logic, you loose most of the surround information.

    Will it support the 5.1 channel output?

    ---
  • There are a few reasons.

    1) Some DVDs ("You've Got Mail", "Lost in Space", and "The Matrix" to name a few) have PC features. Of course they don't run on Macs, and who knows if Wine will work, but those running Win can view that material.

    2) As noted, increased resolution is a factor. Although a computer monitor may be smaller than your television, the picture is better.

    3) Progressive scan. Because Macrovision is lawsuit happy, the only way I know of to get progressive scan output is through some video cards. If your TV is capable (or better yet, your projector is capable) of progressive input, you get a better picture with no line doubler.

    4) If you want a second system (like a lot of people have second VCRs) it may be more practical, especially in a small bedroom, to just use your PC for DVDs instead of taking up room with a PC (with monitor), TV, and DVD player.
  • You don't actually have to crack CSS to be able to do this. Example: There's a bunch of programs on Windows right now which will let you convert a DVD to a) .AVI + .WAV Format files or b) .VOB (unencrypted Mpeg 2) by wrapping the decoder .DLLs or by unsing singgle frame capture + single frame advance.

    PS: if you're interested, have a look at http://windoms.sitek.net/~dvdsoft/dv dsoft.html [sitek.net]

  • Re:Software DVD for Linux? (Score:3)

    by dirty ( 13560 ) <dirtymatt AT gmail DOT com> on Thursday September 02, 1999 @07:02AM (#1709628)
    Already happened. I forget the URL but someone managed to disassemble the instructions for CSS authentication. From what I understand it has since been converted to C. Now they are working on cracking the encryption on the MPEG stream itself. I think AC3 could pose a serious problem though, as IIRC AC3 is patented while CSS is not (there already is an AC3 library for Linux though). For movies that contain a standard PCM track that wouldn't be a problem, but how many actually do?
  • The setup of my PC @ home is:
    ATI All-in-Wonder128, DVD drive, Sigma DVD card, 5.1 decoder, SBLive.

    I use the system both on the monitor AND the TV, in windows we watch DVDs on the TV, browse the web, listen to MP3z with the killer plugins, etc.. In Linux _I_ use the box on the monitor. No matter what, Linux is STILL being pushed aside.
    ATI users only got TV support in Linux in these last few months (GATOS Rocks!)

    No DVD in Linux beacuse the DVD Natzis won't make it so... I would buy, support, build, sell ANY linux-based "convergence" item just based on the fact that I know it'll WORK. We have TV, get on with the rest of "your" "convergence" would you!!!

    I hate those damn buzzwords...
  • The specs for the Zoran-based Matrox DVD add-on card (for Millenium/Mysteque/G200 cards) are publically available. Work is in progress to write a driver for this card. Check the LiViD [openprojects.net] site for more details.

    Nick

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