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Linux Software

Linux DVD Players Reviewed 256

Posted by CmdrTaco from the i-want-my-dvd dept.
Anonymous Coward writes "Linux Journal have posted a review of DVD players on their site. Interesting review, that covers most of the main players, although there are a few minor errors." I've settled on Xine since it does most of the divx, wmv, and mpegs I want to see. If it just did Sorenson QT, it'd be perfect.
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Linux DVD Players Reviewed More

Linux DVD Players Reviewed

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  • Whats the point? (Score:2, Insightful)

    by glrotate ( 300695 )
    Why not just get an el cheapo dvd standalone unit for your TV. You get a remote and probably a bigger picture. Why would anyone watch DVDs on their computer, Gnu/Linux or Windows?

    • Re:Whats the point? (Score:2, Informative)

      by Windfinder ( 469246 )
      Well...I have a 13" television, and a 19" monitor...what would you do? =)
    • Because I don't have a TV at uni.

    • Re:Whats the point? (Score:5, Insightful)

      by itsnotme ( 20905 ) on Wednesday May 08, 2002 @11:26AM (#3485126) Homepage
      Maybe because some of us are college students and we do not have a TV in our room because our room is tiny , but we do have a computer and a decent computer monitor so we would like to use the computer to watch DVDs when we have a break in our sucky schedule!
      • when we have a break in our sucky schedule!

        Yeah, I remember that 10:00AM to 2:00PM sucky schedule. Throw in a couple hours of homework a day, and by gum you have put in a good 8 hour day! Then I am sure you have to go back to your dorm room with free high-speed internet access so you can leech some pr0n and MP3s. Then it is off to the bars for some binge drinking. Then maybe the next day, unless your schedule totally sucks and you have one or two classes, you have the day off.

    • I travel extensively and spend long periods of time abroad often in rather "rustic" apartments with no TVs or DVD standalone units.

      All work and no play, however, makes Jack a dull boy so I often take my favourite DVDs (sometimes I rent more recent films) with me and watch them on my laptop.

      It isn't an IMAX experience but it sure is better than nothing.

    • Television Looks Like Shit, Hi-Res Monitors Don't (Score:5, Informative)

      by FreeUser ( 11483 ) on Wednesday May 08, 2002 @11:57AM (#3485308)
      ... even with the same video signal. Whoever modded the parent post up as "insightful" has shit for brains.

      In answer to the question posted: Why not just get an el cheapo dvd standalone unit for your TV. You get a remote and probably a bigger picture. Why would anyone watch DVDs on their computer, Gnu/Linux or Windows?

      Television looks like shit. It is interlaced, with only 480 lines of resolution (NTSC) or 576 lines (PAL). This means that each stroke of the electronic pen only writes 240 lines (288 lines PAL) per stroke, with each stroke happening 60 times / second (50 times / second PAL). In short, the image is low res, flickery, and fuzzy.

      Contrast that with a 1920x1200 24" LCD monitor, which can play DVDs in progressive, rather than interlaced mode (meaning each swipe of the electronic pen across the screen, 60 times each second, writes all 480 [PAL: 576] lines, rather than just have of them), and can do so at resolutions most consumer televisions simply cannot match, such as 720p.

      Hell, you can take analog video signals, captured with either V4L(1|2) or firewire, encode and compress them into xvid format, and have a better picture than the TV was capable of displaying during the live broadcast. I know. I've done this with two episodes of Max Headroom, with astonishing results. Even my old 8-mm college videos (not hi-8 mind you, just 8-mm video tape) looks better after it has been digitized [expressivefreedom.org], deinterlaced, and displayed on a computer monitor than it does fresh from the master source displayed on the same monitor (but still interlaced), much less the low res television.

      Then there are all kinds of scaling issues involved when trying to use consumer DVD players with high quality monitors or plasma screens, so much so that many videophiles build HTPCs (Home Theatre PCs) in order to fix the scaling artifacts and achieve better quality output than is possible even if spending tens of thousands of dollars on specialized scan converters and scaler hardware designed to do the very same thing.

      The general purpose computer is the best A/V display device available to normal people today, and will remain so for the forseeable future, unless congress decides normal folks shouldn't be allowed to possess the power of a home computer and passes the Hollings Bill or some variant thereof, in which case it is time to emigrate.

      • You know...

        I have a pretty decent 17" monitor and a pretty nice but not stellar 20" TV.

        I have a very good desk, but the chair really isn't good for sitting all through the movie. The monitor isn't really good for watching stuff from far away. TV, on the other hand, looks just nice from my couch or bed.

        Also, the fact that television looks like shit is a good thing. No, it may not be always desired with DVDs. But for video tapes, VideoCDs, or DivX-recorded clips, the TV viewed from far away, or even about one meter, is much better than computer screen - because on the monitor I can see the artifacts and the horror that is VHS. Somewhat softer image is sometimes a very good thing =)

    • Re:Whats the point? (Score:2, Informative)

      by saveth ( 416302 )
      So you don't have to turn your head away from the monitor every time you want to watch a part of the movie. Most geeks' computer chairs are more comfortable than their couches, anyway. :P

  • good news (Score:4, Funny)

    by Billly Gates ( 198444 ) on Wednesday May 08, 2002 @11:23AM (#3485097) Journal
    Now I can donate my hard earned money to the MPAA and watched their css crippled movies only on their terms. Thank you MPAA and thank you slashdot for advertising all there movies here and now their drives.

    • Re:good news (Score:3, Informative)

      by swillden ( 191260 )

      Now I can donate my hard earned money to the MPAA and watched their css crippled movies only on their terms.

      Since these players pretty much all use libdvdcss, which is an unlicensed implementation of CSS and even exploits weaknesses in CSS to recover the DVD keys (rather than having an official player key), I'd say you can safely consider yourself to be watching their movies on your own terms, having successfully circumvented their lame copyright control system.

      Rest easy; there is a very good chance that using these players not only pisses off the MPAA, but might even be illegal as well! What more can any self-respecting geek ask for?

      In case that's not quite enough for you, you could always make your violation of the DVDCCA complete by buying some out-of-region DVDs and modding your DVD drive to play them. Or just pop over to China and buy some non-region-coded, non-encrypted pirate copies of your favorite movies! Put your money where your mouth is and support those hard-working pirates.

      • If you can decrypt CSS yourself, are you still affected by regions? Does the DVD player deny the whole disk or just access to the deecryption keys?

        • Re:good news (Score:4, Informative)

          by swillden ( 191260 ) <shawn-ds@willden.org> on Wednesday May 08, 2002 @05:57PM (#3487501) Journal

          If you can decrypt CSS yourself, are you still affected by regions? Does the DVD player deny the whole disk or just access to the deecryption keys?

          It depends.

          Older DVD-ROM drives didn't do region checking themselves, and relied on the software player to do it. Obviously, none of the free players bother. All newer DVD-ROM drives, however, do the region checking in the hardware (well, firmware), and if the region code on the DVD doesn't match the code on the DVD-ROM then the drive will in fact refuse to give up any data. If you fopen() a file it will succeed, but fread() will return no data (IIRC, it's been a while since I looked). There are hacks for most of them that can fix this defect, however. In most cases this involves loading new firmware and you can download and install the update in a matter of minutes. Of course, you do risk ruining the drive if something goes wrong.

          But that's not the whole answer, because there's a scripting language for DVDs (that's how they make all those interactive menus and games), and some DVDs implement some checking in this scripting language. Basically, the script queries the drive and asks it what region it is set to. If it answers anything other than the region the DVD is intended for then the script directs the player to show a "you can't play this" screen and to disable chapter selection, etc. controls so that you are stuck there.

          Even *that's* not the end of the story, though, because it's the player that executes the interpreter that runs the scripts from the DVD, and in the case of open source players, the interpreters are open source as well. So, interpreter authors are trying to write interpreters that will second guess the scripts they're executing and refuse to honor the code that would lock you out.

      • Every time you buy a DVD you are paying the salaries of the lawyers who put Johansen in jail, you are paying the bribes^Wdonations for the congressmen who wrote the DMCA, and you are paying for more propaganda from the MPAA. It doesn't matter what player you are using, as long as you are paying for the DVD in the first place.
        • So what?

          Did you not read the post you replied to?

          Until the MPAA finds a way to really stop me from using the content I buy in the way that I like, DVDs will be something I buy. At the moment they find a way to impact my usage, then my purchases will stop. Not because I'm "outraged" but simply because their products aren't useful to me.

          If they choose to use that money to pay lawyers and congressmen, that's their business and their loss. That's money they can't invest in new films and money they can't keep as profit.

          It's *far* more effective to send letters and donation checks to my congressmen, plus some more cash to the EFF, than it is to quit buying DVDs. If I stop buying DVDs, the only thing that happens is the members of the MPAA lose a few hundred a year in revenue, with no explanation as to why. In fact, they'll probably blame piracy!

          OTOH, sending $100 to the EFF, $100 to Rep. Boucher and $100 and a letter explaining my issues to each of my senators (plus more when they do the right thing) makes a huge difference. Keep in mind that it is *impossible* for the MPAA to "outbribe" the American public, if the public is interested. For that matter, it's impossible for the MPAA to outbribe the readers of slashdot! Why? Because (a) there are too many of us, (b) the MPAA cannot vote (which is the currency that really matters to elected officials, money is just a way to get votes) and (c) the money that we (I!) give is "hard money", whereas the majority of the MPAA's money is "soft money". Soft money is useful, but hard money is much better.

          So, if you like movies but don't like the MPAA, go ahead and watch/buy the movies, but send half of your movie budget to your senators, congressmen and the EFF.

    • If you had read the article, all four of the reviewed software packages use a non-MPAA approved css decoder. And are free. So, what exactly is it that you are griping about?

  • Hardware Decoders? (Score:4, Interesting)

    by Kenja ( 541830 ) on Wednesday May 08, 2002 @11:24AM (#3485106)
    Since the review is allready dead to the world, I tought I'd ask the people here if htey knew of any Linux based DVD players with support for hardware decoders such as those by Creative Labs and Real Magic.
    • Xine supports the Creative DXR3 and the sigma designes hollywood+
    • mplayer [mplayerhq.hu] has support for DVB and the Hollywood DXR3, according to their website.

    • Re:Hardware Decoders? (Score:3, Informative)

      by aspeer ( 131086 )
      I have not tried the DXR3 support in Xine, but in mplayer it has an annoying habit of getting out of sync with the video. I have patched my version of mplayer to fix this, but the sync problem seems to depend on the DXR3 board rev - some people have no problems, others (like me) get the problem.

      My friends are underwhelmed that I have managed to turn a $2000 PC into a DVD player that does not work quite as well as a $200 dedicated device. However the big advantage of mplayer+ dxr3 is the ability to play *any supported media format* to the TV. DivX included. That is the real win for me - If I could not do that I would have thrown in the towel by now and bought a "real" DVD player.

      With this facility I can capture TV broadcasts from a BT878 card, save in the disk space economical DIVX format, then play back at leisure. So I have now turned my $2000 PC into a bad version of a $500 TIVO device ! Actually if I could buy a TIVO I would, except they are not available where I live (Australia).
      • You might try ogle. I get so-so performance from videolan, sometimes losing sync or getting halty video. Ogle is just beautiful - menus work great, sound is awesome, and the video doesn't halt. I haven't tried Xine or mplayer since I don't need anything but ogle.

      • regarding mplayer (Score:3, Insightful)

        by blonde rser ( 253047 )
        have u tried turning using_dma on with hdparm on /dev/cdrom? Common mistake and fixed everything up with me... also are u using cvs or some version... cvs mplayer is very stable and tends to fix these bugs

      • I tried (weakly) to get DXR3 to work with Xine, and it so far has not worked. It works in MPlayer for me though. DVD playback is flawless (no dropped frames, not A/V sync issues), except all the video is off-center a little to the right. I have sent messages to both the MPlayer and the DXR3 mailing lists, and no one has responded, so I assume that this is a problem that no one know how to fix.

        I can play DivX-formatted video through the card with MPlayer, but the video must be first decoded into full frames and then re-encoded on the fly to send in MPEG-1 format to the DXR3 card. This makes things a little jumpy on my PIII 750. But worst of all is that the aspect ratio is often wrong; the video on the TV will be stretched vertically. Again, I've sent a message about this to both the MPlayer and the DXR3 lists, and again no one has been able to give me a solution to this problem.

        It's really a shame, because DXR3 and MPlayer seem to be the perfect combination to create a good Linux DVD/DivX player for a television. These technical issues still need to be addressed, and there doesn't seem to be anyone around who is either capable or willing to get it working.

    • Preface: Hardware Decoders aren't so important these days. With the speed of the data bus and CPUs in current hardware it almost makes them moot.

      The biggest problem is the region locking built into the hardware of the lastest and greatest. Depending on the hardware you might be able to "flash" the ROM to allow disabling or fixing of the region enforcing parts.

      If you go back to older gear you actually find it more flexible and useful. I have an *ancient* SB DXR3 drive and decoder card. The drive itself is RPC Phase 1 which means it does IO on any disk reguardless of region. A little decss and you have a viable data stream to decode and display.

      One issue, beyond the legality of using de-css software, is that software I've currently played with does a force crack. This isn't too terible on a modern system but without "caching" of the css keys, you may have to wait a moment before you can start playing video. This wait time varies from disk to disk.

      There does exist on sourceforge a kernel driver for the DXR3 decoder card. It requires the IC2 kernel parts to be compiled in as well. Then it is a matter of telling your software to take the data from the disk and piping it to the /dev/em8300-vo and /dev/em8300-ao devices.

      A current problem I have with the decoder card is that it handles some aspects poorly(basically anything outside of the TV 1.33:1 aspect). I can't tell if it is a limitation in the hardware or the software driver. In any case I just go with software diplay but when I can use the hardware decoder it works great. Doing software my system usually eats 30% of the CPU but the hardware takes next to none.
      • Hardware decoders are important if you want digital audio output, unless you happen to have a sound card that supports outputting the AC3 stream of a DVD.

        I got a Hollywood Plus card many years ago so I could hook it to a digital receiver and get 5.1 sound rather than Dolby ProLogic.
  • this may seem a little off topic, but does anyone have an idea of how these two compare?
    • From what I've heard (no idea if it's true) XBox DVD playback is good, but you need to buy an "activation" CD first, which costs about £80. Not sure if that's just rumour or true.
    • I have both a PlayStation 2 and an Xbox, both of which I have purchased the DVD playback kits for. Though it's not necessary for the PlayStation, the remote certainly is more useful for DVD playback than the controller is.

      Anyway - the remote for the PlayStation 2 is $20 at Wal Mart or Best Buy. The DVD Playback Kit for Xbox is $30 and contains a remote and a piece of hardware that fits into one of the controller ports (same as on PS2). Whereas on PS2 you can play DVDs without the remote, it is necessary for the Xbox. That means that the cost is nowhere near £80 - more like £20 or USD $30.

      While it may just be a matter of personal preference, I do feel that the Xbox remote is better all-around. I don't like the ergonomic look of it, but its function far surpasses the PS2's. The PS2 basically made their remote a "wireless controller" complete with Triangle, Circle, Square and X buttons. I shit you not. Why they couldn't have omitted these and made something a little more normal looking, I'm not sure. But they're there.

      The Xbox remote, on the other hand, is just a perfectly normal DVD remote. No silly buttons - it's all about playing back DVDs. It works. That's the most important thing.

      To use the newer DVD software, one must buy a $35 memory card for their PS2 and install the software to that. The Xbox, of course, has the software on the hard drive, which isn't getting filled up any time soon. But an 8MB memory card can go relatively quickly if you play a lot of games and have the DVD software installed.

      As for actual DVD playback quality, hands-down Xbox. The PS2 has several display problems that have already been noted in replies here. The Xbox just looks like a normal DVD player. I consider this a good thing.

      You may want to purchase the "Advanced AV Pack" for the Xbox if you plan to use it as a DVD player - it comes with S-Video cables, which I personally consider necessary to viewing DVDs. YMMV.

      To break it down: The Xbox will cost you $330 with a DVD playback kit and will put out some great looking images. The PS2 will cost you $300 to play DVDs and will look okay most of the time but will really irritate the living hell out of you at others. To make it an actual home-theater DVD watching component, you'll want to spend another $35 for the memory card and $20 for the remote, for a total of $355.

      To break it down even further: useful DVD playback will cost you an extra $30 for the Xbox or $55 for the PS2. And the Xbox looks better. Don't be stupid. Use the Xbox.

      One caveat: the Xbox doesn't support progressive scan. This probably won't be an issue, unless you have a progressive scan TV. If you do, you probably have enough money to buy a separate DVD player that supports progressive scan. So just do that. :)
      • A couple of points I'd like to add:

        Are you talking about a 3rd-party DVD remote for the PS2? The Sony remote for the PS2 is much more like a standard DVD remote. It has buttons like "Title Menu" etc., but the caveat is that it requires 2 meg on your memory card for the updated DVD firmware. Note that, if you have a PS2 with no memory card, you're probably not having much fun with it ;) I thought the X-Box DVD remote was much chintzier, but both more than serve their purpose. As for the PS2 remotes having the standard PS2 buttons, this is a "good thing" if you use your PS2 to play audio CDs. I must say that the X-Box remote and firmware are better integrated, but the PS2's equivalents work nicely.

        PS2 playback could definitely be better. Maybe it's just my setup, but I use S-Video through my Sony receiver into a Sony TV (just illustrating that all of my components are the same brand), and when the screen goes black -- as often happens in transitions -- the TV sometimes tends to "mode switch" (I don't know what to call it). It will just flicker once (like it's being turned on) and the TV will display "DVD" and the time, as though I just changed the channel or switched sources. This doesn't happen all the time, but it can be really irritating. In the Fight Club extras DVD, the scene where Ed Norton is asleep and Tyler Durden checks on him (after the car crash), this is really prominent. The screen fades to black fairly often and each time, my TV "resets." I have pretty good quality components, damnit, and this is what I get?

  • Mirror - Slashdotted already (Score:4, Redundant)

    by itsnotme ( 20905 ) on Wednesday May 08, 2002 @11:31AM (#3485161) Homepage
    I've already maxed out my karma so I dont want more.. here's the article since it's slashdotted..

    Linux Review: GNU/Linux DVD Player Review
    Posted on Monday, May 06, 2002 by Jon Kent Printer Friendly Page Send this Article to a Friend

    Multimedia Jon takes a look at Xine, VideoLAN Client, MPlayer and Ogle--four GNU/Linux DVD playback applications.

    Playing DVDs under GNU/Linux has not had the happiest of histories, what with the DeCSS debacle and subsequent legal battle. So you'd be forgiven for thinking that you will never be able to play your DVDs on your GNU/Linux system. Luckily, this is not the case, and there are several applications available for you to download and use. The issue with DeCSS is still with us but is slowly getting clearer. However, this has left some of the DVD players officially not supporting encrypted DVDs, although unofficially, playback is possible via third-party additions.

    This introduction to DVD playback applications for GNU/Linux looks at Xine, VideoLAN Client, MPlayer and Ogle. In addition to playing encrypted DVDs, unofficially in some cases, several of these players also will play back other file formats.

    Xine

    Xine has quite a large following, and for good reason, as it is a very capable DVD player. In addition, like most of the players reviewed here, Xine is capable of playing a large range of file types in addition to unencrypted-DVD playback. Xine easily can be extended with additional functionality as it supports plugins that enable you to incorporate new codecs (open- or closed-source) or any additional function easily. There are many plugins available for Xine on the Net ready to be downloaded.

    Xine only supports the playback of unencrypted DVD directly, but support for encrypted DVDs is provided by a third-party plugin (xine_d4d_plugin). It is unlikely that Xine will support encrypted DVDs directly. The legal status of this plugin is, as always, debatable, but it is easy enough to find and install. There are some useful links on the Xine web site, and a search at Google should find the required links for this plugin. It is stated on the Xine web site that encrypted DVD playback is not going to be supported directly because of the legal issues that surround this area. However, once you have installed the plugin, Xine's playback of encrypted DVDs is smooth with no noticeable problems with audio synchronization or any video glitches.

    Xine's interface is tidy and provides most of the function you might require. Depending upon your preferences, you may find that it takes up too much space on your desktop. As Xine is currently not skinnable, there is no way to change the size or layout of the GUI. If you are running XFree86 4.x, with a supported video card, you can switch Xine from windowed to full-screen mode and back again smoothly. If this is not supported by your video card or version of X, Xine still can be viewed in a window, which is the default startup mode.

    Unfortunately, Xine does not support DVD menus directly; however, there is a plugin called dvdnav (available from prdownloads.sourceforge.net/dvd) that adds this functionality to Xine. This plugin is a must-have if you intend to use Xine for DVD playback. The plugin works very well, even with the complex animated menus that some DVDs have, and although this is not required for DVD playback, it obviously gives you complete access to all the features available. The code for the DVD navigation was written referencing the original Ogle DVD menu code base.

    Xine is a good DVD player, and with the use of plugins it can be extended in many ways. It appears to have a solid following, which should ensure its survival. The interface, however, may not be to everyone's taste.

    VideoLAN Client

    The VideoLAN Client is part of the VideoLAN Project, a full MPEG-2 client/server solution. However, the VideoLAN Client also can be used as a standalone program to play MPEG-2 streams from a hard disk or DVD. It currently has GTK+, GNOME, KDE and Qt front ends and can use either X11, XVideo, SDL or DirectX for video output. For audio, VideoLAN Client supports OSS, ALSA and ESD. To access encrypted DVDs, VideoLAN Client uses the library libdvdcss, which is a simple library designed for accessing DVDs like a block device without having to bother with the decryption. VideoLAN Client does not use DeCSS but a different implementation that does not use the cracked Xing decoder key. The libdvdcss was written by the VideoLAN Client development team, using the original DeCSS code as a reference base.

    DVD playback with VideoLAN Client is very smooth with no noticeable problems with audio synchronization. When you start viewing a DVD, it defaults to opening up a window to display the movie, but you switch to full-screen mode quickly and easily by pressing the F key, as with the other players reviewed here. The switch from windowed view to full-screen view, and back again, is very quick and smooth with no slowing of playback.

    VideoLAN Client GUI is a rather large window by default, the largest of the group. This seems unnecessary, and although you can shrink it down, it does not scale very well--a minor point, but it does seem overly big for what is a simple interface. That said, the GUI itself is fairly easy to navigate, with buttons to Stop, Pause, Forward and so on. Preferences also can be modified for items such as the path to the DVD/VCD device, audio device and output to use, the default interface and so on. It is the only player reviewed here that allows you to modify the preferences from the GUI.

    The only drawback to VideoLAN Client is that there is currently no support for DVD menus, so you only can see the movie and you cannot access any additional items. This is not a major drawback and should not be held against VideoLAN Client as its DVD playback is as good as Xine and MPlayer. If you are not too worried about having DVD menu support and can live with the largest GUI of the players reviewed here, VideoLAN Client is a good choice.

    MPlayer

    MPlayer is another movie player that can play most MPEG, VOB, AVI, VIVO, ASF/WMV and QT/MOV files supported by many native, XAnim and Win32 DLL codecs. In addition to this you can watch VideoCD, SVCD, DVD, 3ivx and even DivX movies. In this respect it supports more formats than any of the other players reviewed here.

    In addition to all of these video formats, MPlayer also supports a wide range of output drivers. It works with X11, Xv, DGA, OpenGL, SVGAlib, fbdev and AAlib, and you can use SDL and some low-level card-specific drivers (for Matrox, 3Dfx and RADEON) as well. Most of them support software or hardware scaling, so you can enjoy movies in full screen. Lastly, MPlayer supports displaying through some hardware MPEG decoder boards, such as the DVB and DXR3/Hollywood+. Blimey that's a list and a half.

    So this looks like a one-stop shop for movie playback, but how does it perform? Very well. There are occasionally synchronization problems with DVD playback but nothing too major. The only thing to remember is that MPlayer does need to be run on a fairly powerful PC (greater than 500MHz) to work properly. If you are running on low power, MPlayer definitely is not for you. On lower spec machines the audio synchronization can get very messy, and the video becomes jerky, making the DVD, and other movie types, unwatchable. If you are using a lower spec machine, VideoLAN Client would appear to be the best option.

    Encrypted DVDs are supported using the libcss library and, optionally, libdvdread for chapter support. As with the other players, encrypted support is not provided directly by MPlayer; you will need to download the libraries yourself. Unlike Xine, MPlayer does not support plugins, so you need to ensure that the libraries are installed before compiling.

    MPlayer does not compile with a GUI by default, which is a little bizarre. To be fair, this is not a negative point as this is not really required if you just intend to use MPlayer to play back DVDs, as it does not support DVD menus. So having a GUI is not really necessary for DVD playback. However, if you intend to use MPlayer to play back other file types, you will need the GUI. To have GUI support you need to specify this if you compile from source by adding --enable-gui to the configure script.

    To access the GUI you then either start MPlayer with a -gui switch (MPlayer does not use the standard --, which is usual for switches of more than one letter) or link MPlayer to gMPlayer, and then call gMPlayer instead. Another hurdle to get over with a GUI is that MPlayer is skinnable, but the standard source code has no skin, so the GUI still will not work. You need to download a skin from the MPlayer web site and install it, which is an irritating step. However, once all these additional steps are completed you are then presented with a usable interface to MPlayer. The interface, using the default skin, presents a simple and clean looking interface, that does not take up too much screen space. For those of you that find the Xine interface a little too bulky, MPlayer may suit you.

    MPlayer's main drawback, or at least irritation, is that you cannot access a DVD from the GUI; instead you have to start MPlayer with the -dvd flag in order for it to play your DVD. To view another DVD currently means that you have to restart MPlayer. Lastly, there is no support for DVD menus available at present, so you cannot access the additional features of your DVD with MPlayer.

    As a one-stop shop for movie playback, MPlayer scores very highly. It is fast (assuming you have a fairly new PC), and DVD playback is very good with no audio synchronization problems. With the support for multiple file format, you may find that MPlayer is all that you need.

    Ogle

    Ogle is purely a DVD player and was the first to support DVD menus and navigation, the code of which is now used in the Xine plugin as mentioned earlier. As with VideoLAN Client and MPlayer, Ogle uses libcss and libdvdread to decode and read DVDs. The MPEG decoder features various levels of acceleration to take advantage of MMX processors and some hardware MPEG decoders.

    Ogle can be run directly from the shell, but a GUI is also available if you prefer. The GUI is more compact than VideoLAN Client's, but manages to contain more functionality. All of the major functions are present, such as pausing, forwarding the DVD and menu keys. That said, the interface to the control GUI is still larger than the standard MPlayer GUI and is not as nice to look at. Unfortunately, although there is an option to edit preferences, it is not currently functional.

    When you first access your DVD from Ogle you are presented with the DVD menu, which you navigate using your mouse. You also can navigate the DVD menu by using the arrows on the GUI, but navigation using the mouse seems to be the easiest method by far. Unfortunately, playback of encrypted DVDs is occasionally not as smooth as with VideoLAN Client or MPlayer as there are freezes and audio glitches. However, this is occasional and does not detract too much from watching a DVD, but it might be a consideration. As with the other players reviewed, you can switch between windowed and full-screen mode, and again, switching between the modes goes smoothly.

    Ogle does have a few drawbacks, the main ones being that there is no chapter menu support, no angle selection during playback and no closed-caption support. The most annoying issue is that you have to restart Ogle to play another DVD, which is the same problem MPlayer has. These may not be major issues to you but are worth taking into consideration.

    Ogle is the only one of the players reviewed here that only plays DVDs and not any other formats. Its main claim to fame was the DVD menu support, but thanks to the fact that Ogle is open-source, the code base is now being used in other players. If you only want to play DVDs, then Ogle is worth reviewing, but if your needs are wider than that, you probably will want to look at one of the other players.

    In conclusion, playing your bought-and-paid-for DVDs under your favorite OS is now achieved easily using any of the players reviewed here. There are many other players available; the ones we reviewed here have the most supporters and users. As always, because there are a wide range of DVD players to choose from, you should be able to find a player to suit your requirements. So go ahead and enjoy your DVDs on your GNU/Linux box.

    Jonathan Kent is a system integration consultant working in the financial sector on real-time market data delivery systems. He has been using UNIX for the past ten years and GNU/Linux for four years. He lives with his family in the United Kingdom.

  • What about DivX files? I've heard of some upcoming stand-alone players that play MPEG4 stuff, but they probably won't be cheap, and right now most DVD players play DVD/(S)VCD/mp3/CD. If you have a DVD drive on your computer anyway, and a 17" monitor (or TV output capabilities), then doesn't it make sense to find good software to make your computer an entertainment center? The biggest misconception that a lot of the movie industry has is that people don't want to watch movies on their computer monitor. As a student I do this all the time.
    • mplayer plays divx very well, I've used it to watch some of the tv shows I've taped using divx and it seems to play it really well without frame dropping..
    • This google result [powerdivx.com] talks about playing DivX's on the Sega Dreamcast, which can probably be had for $50 these days give or take. The Dreamcast's Hitachi SH4/200 isn't the quickest processor out there, so this guide indicates to use small resolution divx's, 320x240 or 496x496 and suggests mono MP3's. For a poorman's solution, and seeing as how most television shows taped are 320x(240|288), this should work well.

      One idea is to just make a dedicated box yourself--I'm debating this. Playing DivX's with MPlayer on my Celeron 500 takes about 25% CPU if I use the matrox MGA output plugin. The Voodoo3 output plugin is also supported. The Voodoo3's S-video out can be activated with lm-sensors, a linux i2c tool. (or so I'm told) Cobble something together and you could have a nice QAD solution.

  • A crack in the wall (Score:4, Insightful)

    by destinyland ( 578448 ) on Wednesday May 08, 2002 @11:35AM (#3485184)
    I agree that the MPAA, DeCSS, the DMCA, and technology journalism all suck. But the real problem remains that the old media dinosaurs are entrenched. Like today's big Lawrence Lessig article [businessweek.com] in Business Week, argues, Congress is in the pocket of the big Hollywood studios.

    How does this tie back to Linux DVD players? Well, it's a minor miracle when there's any publicity for anything that even remotely challenges the status quo. It's one more crack in the wall....

    ---
    Destiny-land [blogspot.com].
    The happiest blog on earth.

  • ...a DVD->ANSI Animation converter. How cool would that be?

    It'd solve a lot of those bandwidth problems... much like this site [asciimation.co.nz] which was posted a while ago.

    You wouldn't need a player if it's ANSI animation either, "cat" and "type" could become the hottest media players around.

  • dvd howto (Score:2, Informative)

    by dcstimm ( 556797 )
    DVD how-to [linuxguru.net] this is a great how-to for getting xine to work with dvd nav! great how-to!

  • Xine, worst interface ever (Score:5, Interesting)

    by gnugnugnu ( 178215 ) on Wednesday May 08, 2002 @11:39AM (#3485208) Homepage
    Xines support for DivX (with a little help from wine [winehq.com]) alone makes it worth using for me but aside from that i really dont like Xine. I like Gnome, I like KDE and I think the open source software has become hugely more easy to use in the past few years.
    Xine [sourceforge.net] however has possilby the worst interface [iarchitect.com] I have ever had the misfortune to use.
    Someone decided that it would be a good idea to implement their own file open dialog and playlist and design in a way that bears no resemblance to any other interface i have ever used. Using, or at least trying to use Xine is cruel and unusual punishment.
    I suggested it to a friend who wanted to watch some DivX files and the interface was so bad it mad him laugh (then cry).
    And to add even more potential for confusion it uses its own skinning system.

    Gnome Xine [sourceforge.net] will hopefully be a vast improvement and have the sense to bear at least some resemblence to quicktime/microsoft mediaplayer/realplayer.

    • ogle/xtheater/pythontheater offer more consistant dialogs. At least xine's gui is better than mplayers, mplayer doesn't even support drag and drop, while xine does. Too many of these media programs insist that they have to have a new and unique interface, which is total stupidity..
    • One of the projects in my pipe is a KDE DVD (only for the moment but thats only so version 0.1 comes out quickly) based on the old kxine code.

      A screenie [ucam.org] shows the DVD playback working (using the xine engine) but it will have a KDE wrapper. It works but is a bit rough :)

      I also hate the xine GUI and I work on the xine project but the emphasis at the moment is increasing stability, flexability and quality of playback (oh and ironing out those pesky DVD-menu bugs).

    • amen to this. The playlist dialogs are awful awful awful. The MRL concept is totally overwrought for a media player. And worst of all, the dvdnav plugin doesn't deal with the playlist, so if you want to skip forward a chapter you DO NOT push the ->| button, because then it will go to some weird menu. ugh.
    • I dislike its interface too. I rarely use Xine since I like Mplayer's GUI better.

    • [sourceforge.net]
      A screenshot

      Homepage [sourceforge.net]

      Description (from the homepage):

      Copyright (C) 2001-2002 Gürer Özen
      Sinek is free software; you can redistribute it and/or modify it under the terms of the GNU General Public License.

      Sinek is a GTK+ video/audio player, capable of supporting all formats libxine supports. At the moment, this includes; Audio MPEG 1, 2, and 3, Vorbis (.ogg), Video MPEG 1 and 2, MPEG 4 (aka OpenDivX), MS MPEG 4 (aka DivX) and motion jpeg.

      One of the main differences between Sinek and other popular multimedia players is that it doesn't use skins; instead, it has a standard GTK+ interface. In other words, it doesn't clash with your GTK+ theme. :)

      Other features are

      * scriptable with scheme language,
      * supports text subtitles,
      * you can adjust font (any X font!) and placement of subtitles on the fly,
      * playlist with repeat, repeat current, and shuffle options,
      * configurable key bindings,
      * changing the volume with the mouse wheel,
      * want something else? just tell on our mailing list :)

  • DVD APIs? (Score:5, Interesting)

    by Malc ( 1751 ) on Wednesday May 08, 2002 @11:52AM (#3485282)
    Where do the DVD API's for Linux stand? These days it's becoming relatively simple under Windows thanks to DirectShow. Anybody can write a DVD player as they don't need to do any low-level stuff: it's just a matter of making API calls to the navigator. Can the same be said for Linux? E.g. what would it take to write a Mozilla plug-in so that I could display a training movie within a web page - a plug-in that would work for most DVD players/decoders without having to write custom code for each?

    • Re:DVD APIs? (Score:2, Informative)

      by demon ( 1039 )
      I think you're talking on a different level than most of us who would think of DVD APIs. No, there's not yet a "DVD player library" that everyone can use - but that's because unlike Microsoft, where (a) their source is closed, and (b) they have gobs of money to toss at the DVD CCA to get a copy of the DVD book specs, Linux DVD players are being developed largely by way of reverse engineering.

      However, stuff like libdvdread (which hooks to libdvdcss, if it's present) is pretty much used by everyone who's interested in DVD playback. I know the Xine guys have done some work on writing a Mozilla plugin that hooks the xine-lib backend for embedded media content playback. Don't get stuck in the Microsoft way of thinking though - that we should all just use what is gifted to us by the likes of MS, and not ask questions. The different groups developing DVD support on Linux are (at least to some degree) cooperating and learning from one another, so eventually all the Linux DVD players will be really good. Though I personally like Xine a lot (its DXr3 support is actually getting pretty good).
    • Well, I'd guess the equivalent is the various libraries that were mentioned:

      libcss, libdvdread etc. I'm not sure how far exactly you would take this, but it shouldn't be too hard to write your own DVD player in Linux.

      One simpler solution might be to get the KDE/GNOME guys to write a decent DVD player for their environments and then use their component models KParts or Bonobo (a la ActiveX) to embed the player component right into the plugin.

      • "Well, I'd guess the equivalent is the various libraries that were mentioned:

        libcss, libdvdread etc. I'm not sure how far exactly you would take this, but it shouldn't be too hard to write your own DVD player in Linux."

        And would that allow me to transparently make use of the hardware facilities provided by the likes of the H+ decoder card, or ATI graphics card? Or, would I have to write custom code for each one's APIs and detect what to use at runtime? This is what the DirectShow API under Windows gives me for free - the player doesn't need to care about the hardware, but it will get used transparently depending on whose drivers have been installed. I guess this is what my original question was aiming at - what *standard* APIs are there beyond those for just getting the data off the DVD disc?
        • I found this [linuxtv.org],not sure how complete it is, but it might be worth a look.

          One thing to bear in mind is that there are really not many "standard" APIs in the Linux world, other than perhaps the POSIX calls and X, ie the legacy of the commercial unix heritage. The rest works on an evolutionary basis - the survival of the fittest. This means you use the best API for your needs. If it's not currently installed then the software manager will auto-install the dependancies (well in theory, yes i know that doesn't always work but that's nor relevant and being resolved anyway).

          Also remember that Linux DVD support is pretty new. Being non-commercial, support for it had to be reverse engineered, so there may not have been enough time yet for a complete set of DVD APIs to emerge. It'll happen though, have no doubt, though I couldn't say what it'll be like or when.

          • The POSIX calls are mainly the v7 calls. There are some which were added later, in the Xenix, BSD & SysIII/SysV worlds, but without the v7 calls, you couldn't do anything useful, while the opposite is not true.

            It's not so much a case of survival of tbe fittest, it's more a case of when the v7 calls and X calls were designed, they were designed by a single group of people, and everyone else adopoted them, there wasn't any alternatives designed or implemented. The *nix world was much smaller then, so everyone who was interested knew about the efforts going on and didn't duplicate them. Now, there are too many people developing for anyone to know about them all. If someone is interested in doing something which needs a new API, then 5 or 6 other people may also be interested, and they will also define their own API's, so instead of one clear API, we get a mess.

        • Get used to it; this is how Windows will wind up if the courts get their way.
        • And would that allow me to transparently make use of the hardware facilities provided by the likes of the H+ decoder card, or ATI graphics card?


          Well, aside from the fact it is extremely unlikely we'll learn how to use it. All the information we have on that function of the ATI cards is about 5 lines of register names. Considering ATI hasn't released information on the motion compensation units in their cards from 7 years ago...

          R C
          Gatos [sf.net] core team member
    • There is no real API on Linux for Multimedia.
      Right now it's all loose apps and libraries.
      The people of Gstreamer have started Gstreamer as a project to build such a standard, and to make it easy to build applications to use the Gstreamer framework.
      It's not ready yet, but it is being worked on.
  • MPlayer's main drawback, or at least irritation, is that you cannot access a DVD from the GUI; instead you have to start MPlayer with the -dvd flag in order for it to play your DVD. To view another DVD currently means that you have to restart MPlayer. Lastly, there is no support for DVD menus available at present, so you cannot access the additional features of your DVD with MPlayer.


    This is false. If you start gmplayer, and then middle click in the video window, you get a menu which clearly states: "Play DVD"

    So in fact, you do not need to start it from the command line. A real problem though is that sometimes this does not play back the desired audio track. Depending on the DVD, you may have to specify the audio track on the commandline.

    All in all, mplayer is a sweet piece of software and arpi and the others deserve thanks for providing us (me at least) with a great media player.

  • Mplayer all the way (Score:4, Informative)

    by matusa ( 132837 ) <chisel.gmail@com> on Wednesday May 08, 2002 @11:54AM (#3485291) Homepage
    For some reason mplayer doesn't seem to get too much press. But honestly, it is easily the best one..

    At the moment it is easily the fastest (I know; I have a p500, and the speed difference between it and many others (I've tried way more than this review) is incredible), and development is very fast at the moment (xine is rather stagnant). The team is working hard at getting core features down before they hit the frills. Some people may argue that all the optimizations aren't supposed to be considered core issues, but screw that. I want smooth DVD playback!!

    At this moment they have lots of amazing features like mencoder, which is a related video encoding project, vidix output (their own hardware accelerated video output, which is blazing fast), support for many many file types, and the speed is incredible.

    Some gripes people have had, for instance (a) wasn't GPL and (b) binaries need to be compiled on a specific machine for optimization--both are moot points now! They are now fully GPL and are moving all the optimization to runtime configurable rather than compile-time defined (they are very far along with this). You should expect official packages to enter all distributions soon.

    Really, it's an amazing project. They catch some flak, but honestly, it performs very well, and is going to get even better! Once the core has stabilized they will polish up all the outside stuff.

    • Some gripes people have had, for instance (a) wasn't GPL and (b) binaries need to be compiled on a specific machine for optimization--both are moot points now! They are now fully GPL

      Not according to this [mplayerhq.hu]
    • xine is rather stagnant

      Huh? Xine 0.99 just came out 11 days ago and as Krischi noted, there have been hundreds of CVS commits in the last few weeks. Sourceforge rates it as a highly active project (it just made it into the top 100 most active [sourceforge.net] projects). I don't know what Xine you're talking about, but the Xine I use has the momentum of a lot of developers throwing their weight behind it.

  • We need low-cost, generic set-top computers.

    There's a need for low-cost computer hardware in a VCR form factor, for PVRs, game consoles, etc. If the Linux community can get together with the consumer electronics companies who flood the world with cheap VCRs and TV sets, the market could be sizeable.

    So far, everybody who's tried this has botched the software and marketing side. But keep trying. There's no reason a PVR has to be a proprietary product tied to some service.

    • HERE [allwell.tv]
      the metallic version is what you seek. DO NOT buy the one with the mpeg playback card, the EM8400 chipset sucks big time.

      Many of us have it already... About $395.00
      bare bones with nothing but ram+processor
  • One of the MPAA arguments against DeCSS is that there is no significant no-infringing use. Well I guess there are now many significant legal uses for DeCSS. Furthermore, I would argue that any binary version of xine/mplayer/videolan that would be found in a distribution (as RPM) should be perfectly legal...
  • There are in my opinion two really good DVD players for Linux:

    1. Xine
    2. Ogle

    I use Xine for the most time since it's also capable of playing all kinds of video formats. But actually Ogle is better for pure DVD playing. I'm not sure if this is true anymore but Xine uses Ogle's code for DVD menu navigation. DVD menu navigation is something we had to wait a really long time to get in Linux. I was even so desperate I tried some strange (propably illegal) port of WinDVD called LinDVD a while ago, but now I'm proud to support real GNU projects.

    Very strange is that neither of the players can manage to play Depeche Mode - The Videos DVD with sound. :-/

    Ciryon

  • Correction regarding Xine, CSS and DVD menus (Score:4, Informative)

    by swillden ( 191260 ) <shawn-ds@willden.org> on Wednesday May 08, 2002 @12:41PM (#3485606) Journal

    From the article:

    Xine only supports the playback of unencrypted DVD directly, but support for encrypted DVDs is provided by a third-party plugin (xine_d4d_plugin).
    ...
    Unfortunately, Xine does not support DVD menus directly; however, there is a plugin called dvdnav (available from prdownloads.sourceforge.net/dvd) that adds this functionality to Xine. This plugin is a must-have if you intend to use Xine for DVD playback

    Actually, the current recommended way to play all DVDs, encrypted and unencrypted, is with dvdnav. If you have installed libdvdcss (preferably the one available at the Ogle web site, I believe), dvdnav will recognize it and use it.

    The xine_d4d_plugin isn't maintained well and doesn't work at all with the latest versions of Xine, AFAIK. dvdnav is the better choice.

  • I have an audio-server box that I've avoided installing X on. It's a glorified file server that sits with my TV & audio components, but it also has a DVD-ROM drive and video card with composite output plus a DXR2 decoder card that I'm not exploiting. I enjoy the minimal command-line and console style interface on that box, and I don't accumulate a lot of extra processes or libraries. So is it possible for me to play back DVDs (or DiVXs) from the command-line without X? ie, the app would send the output to the DXR2's composite/s-video output, or possibly to a full-screen VGA buffer? (ie, I don't want/need a windowed GUI environment on this box)
  • From the xine hacker's guide:
    when in doubt, use lower case. BTW: This thing is called xine, never Xine.
  • Any plane trip requires my laptop and a fresh dvd for an in flight movie, it'll drive the guy sitting next to you nuts.
  • MPEG and DVD players are all fine and dandy, but I'm curious as to the best way, under Linux, to record from a video source and encode it into MPEG2. I've been looking around lately, and there seem to be a few what-appear-to-be-options, but it all seems rather unclear to me if and how this stuff can be put together for a complete solution.

    The requirements I'm looking for are:

    • The ability to grab a raw 640x480 NTSC signal (including audio!) at 30fps from a video card (it doesn't matter what kind of video card - I'll buy whatever I need!) and dump it to a (large) hard drive in an uncompressed format.
    • The ability to crop and join these recordings.
    • The ability to do a high-quality MPEG2 encoding from these captured recordings. This doesn't have to be a real-time encoding, since the source is now just a series of hard drive files, so all of the quality parameters can be pumped way up.

    Does anybody have any experience with this type of procedure? Do you have any advice to share? I have a pile of old VHS tapes that are decaying, and I'd like to get a high-quality digital capture of them before they get too bad.

    • You might want to look at NuppelVideo [tuwien.ac.at]. I've used it to create mpegs froma tv-tuner card, which I subsequently burned to VCD. I've been very happy with the results. The tarball includes documentation and scripts to convert the recorded files to mpeg using lame, mpeg2enc, and mplex.

      Also, the Linux VCR HOWTO [tldp.org] may have some useful information for you.

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