David McGuffey wrote:
On Wed, Jun 3, 2009 at 8:52 AM, David McGuffey davidmcguffey@verizon.net wrote:
This is my first post here on the CentOS forums.? I've been running
Fedora
since FC4, and have been working with RHEL 4 at work.? But this is
my first
foray into CentOS.
I followed the multimedia guidance on the wiki, and now have the
ability to
view a lot of different video clips on the Internet, and have the
ability to
listen to a variety of music files.? However, watching a DVD movie
still
escapes me. I followed all the steps on the page in the wiki, and
had no
errors in the output.
DVD playing has been kind of an odd problem for me on my desktop computer using CentOS 5.3. No problem at all on my laptop. I like and use VLC, but it won't play DVDs on this particular computer -- I get a segmentation error. Nor will mPlayer or Totem work. Xine works fine, so I just use that. VLC works fine on my laptop. I've never had any luck with Totem.
When I put the DVD (Master and Commander in this case), into the
drive,
totem automatically comes up and I get a warning that I don't have
the
correct codec to play it.
That's my experience. And there never seems to be any fix that actually works.
I killed totem and manually tried to start the DVD with mplayer.
mplayer sat
there...not recognizing that there was a DVD in the drive.
mPlayer, on my computer, recognizes the DVD, it just doesn't play it.
So...what final steps do I need to complete to get a commercial DVD
movie to
play?
machine is a Dell Latitude D830 with 2GB of ram and an Intel Core 2
Duo.
The first thing I would try is downloading and installing VLC. If that doesn't work, go for Xine.
-- RonB -- Using CentOS 5.3
Thanks...you are the second one to recommend xine.
I gave up on toten and mplayer and loaded xine. It recognized the dvd and played it...but it gives me an error/warning about dropping lots of frames and jerks to a halt once every few seconds. I'm working my way through the xine FAQ concerning performance to see if I can fix that on this laptop. The laptop is only about 18 mo old and not a dog. It is an Intel duo with 2GM of ram, and should have enough steam to play a dvd. It plays them well under MS Vista, but jerky under Centos 5.3 and xine, so it has to be a software issue.
Xine is my choice for commercial DVDs; VLC for the streaming formats (youtube, etc. captures to .swf files). YMMV. As for your jerks, you might want to be sure dma is enabled:
[root@mavis ~]# hdparm /dev/hdc /dev/hdc: IO_support = 1 (32-bit) unmaskirq = 1 (on) using_dma = 1 (on) keepsettings = 0 (off) readonly = 0 (off) readahead = 256 (on) HDIO_GETGEO failed: Inappropriate ioctl for device
If that looks copasetic, you might want to try another DVD or two before changing too many of Xine's several options.
[root@mavis ~]# wc -l /home/rj/.xine/config 838 /home/rj/.xine/config [root@mavis ~]#
As far as processing power, I've watched dozens of movies on this machine running an AMD Athlon(tm) XP 2600+ at ~2GHz and 2GB ram, which worked every bit as well as it did when I had only 512MB.
I have watched a few movies on another box running an P-3 at 1GHz and 768MB.
BTW, you really need to send properly threaded messages with a meaningful subject if you want to attract the best help possible on this list. A lot of these guys do this stuff for a living and simply don't have time to sort through everything. Traffic here is 'way less that it is on the Fedora list and you might want to try NOT using the digest mode.