[CentOS] Can't play DVD movies on CentOS 5.3 after following guidance on the wiki

Wed Jun 3 19:07:21 UTC 2009
MHR <mhullrich at gmail.com>

On Wed, Jun 3, 2009 at 8:07 AM, Nicolas Thierry-Mieg
<Nicolas.Thierry-Mieg at imag.fr> wrote:
> David McGuffey wrote:
>>
>> 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.
>>
>
> you could install xine (it's in rpmforge), it works well for me for DVDs.
> then the following should work:
> xine dvd://

I like xine for most DVD playing - as long as it recognizes the DVD, I
have no trouble with it at all.  It also has a feature that mplayer
lacks - turning off the screen saver while the movie is playing (which
also has its drawbacks...).

Mplayer needs a little more information to play a DVD than just
running it.  You didn't post your command line, so I'm not sure what
you did, but you typically have to enter something like this:

mplayer -dvd-device /dev/<your-dvd-player-here> dvd://<track #>

(or do what I did and make an alias for it).  If your screen saver is
on a timer that's shorter than the movie, you'll need to type
something or move the mouse every so often, too, and you have to be
careful not to type something that will stop mplayer!

I've never had any luck with totem.  It has never had the right
codecs, it doesn't update with yum to get them, it won't automatically
go fetch them, and since I like both xine and mplayer, I never
bothered to find out why or how.

HTH

mhr