by Christopher Bruns, January 2003
Because my computer costs 20 times as much as a commercial DVD player, I wanted to see if I could extract the same functionality from it that I would expect from a consumer electronics device.
Features are ordered by approximate decreasing importance to me
| Desired Features | MPlayer v. 0.90rc4 | Ogle v. 0.8.5 | Xine v. 1beta12 | VLC v. 0.5.1 |
| Plays encrypted DVDs | Y | Y | Y | Y |
| Full Screen Display | Y | Y | Y | Y |
| Remote control support | Y | Y | Y | Y |
| Pause | Y | Y | Y | Y |
| Skip forward/back | Y | by chapter only | Y | ? |
| Fast Forward/Reverse | N | forward only | forward only | forward only |
| Slow motion | N | Y | Y | Y |
| DVD Menu browsing | N | Y | Y | Y |
| Bookmarking | ? | ? | ? | ? |
| AC3 5.1 channel digital audio output | Y | ? | Y | Y |
| DTS 5.1 channel digital audio output | ? | ? | ? | ? |
| Anamorphic widescreen display | Y | N | Y | ? |
| Can start up in full screen mode | Y | N | Y | Y |
Mplayer will work on a wider range of hardware/software platforms than Ogle. Mplayer has always worked on my system, through two major hardware upgrades. To get Ogle to work, I had to change the sound card from SoundBlaster PCI128 (which has limited functionality in Linux) to a SBLive! 5.1 sound card. I also had to upgrade my kernel from 2.4.18 to 2.4.20 to get DMA enabled on my DVD drive (which Ogle requires). The kernel upgrade also permitted me to respond to Mplayer's complaint about being unable to used the Real Time Clock device. But at least Mplayer worked without it.
ALSA: To get six channel digital audio to work, I had to install alsa. I disabled the built in emu10k driver in my kernel, and used the kernel module built by alsa instead.
bunzip2 -c -d alsa-driver-0.9.0rc7 | tar -xvf
cd alsa-driver-0.9.0rc7
./configure --with-cards=emu10k1 --with-sequencer=yes
make
su
make install
./snddevices
chmod a+rw /dev/dsp /dev/mixer /dev/sequencer /dev/midi
see http://www.alsa-project.org/alsa-doc/doc-php/template.php3?company=Creative+Labs&card=Soundblaster+Live&chip=EMU10K1&module=emu10k1 for more
LIRC: the linux remote control interface. My .lircrc file is configured to launch and run mplayer, xine, ogle, and vlc.
First install Ogle.
./configure --enable-alsa make su make installTo get the remote control to work, next install the ogle_ir patch from http://rosko.net/ogle/. Then make and install ogle again.
Xine: I installed xinelib and xine_ui
VLC (Video Lan Client): First, install lots of libraries - see http://www.videolan.org/vlc/download-sources.html. Next, install vlc.
./configure --enable-alsa --enable-gnome --enable-lirc --enable-xvideo make su make install
VLC now shows DVD menus properly, but the biggest drawback for me is that there is no way to jump to the DVD menu from the remote control. I would much rather use MPlayer, which does not support DVD menus and jumps to the main feature, rather than have to fast forward through the 15 minutes of fluff that some DVDs put in before showing the menu. "Just press MENU to skip the previews" is the cruel mocking nemesis of VLC viewers who want the use the remote control rather than having to type at click at the computer console.
Please send questions or comments about this page to Chris Bruns.