Watching DVDs (Was: Re: Choosing a new laptop)

[Chris BeHanna]

On Wednesday 09 July 2003 12:01, Alexey Koptsevich wrote:
> > : Is it possible to watch DVDs in FreeBSD, or is that another reason to
> > : keep the Windows partition?
> >
> > I do this all the time with my Dell I8000, but it has the dvd drive
> > built in.  i have no experience with dvd via cardbus/pccard to speak
> > of.
>
> What is the best program for it? Can you watch any DVD? I can watch some
> with mplayer, and some kick the system off so the computer reboots.
> However, my mplayer has not been updated for a while...

    Having tried to port the mess that is LiViD back in the day, and
having tried xine and xmovie, I switched to mplayer for awhile and
have now settled on ogle.  Of all of them, ogle now has the smoothest
playback and makes the best use of motion compensation (on the old 8MB
ATI chip in my HP OmniBook 4150B, anyway), and ogle is the only player
I know of with DVD menu support.

    The single biggest trick is to make sure that DMA is enabled on
your DVD drive.

    Note:  I have not tried this on -CURRENT; only on -STABLE
(currently 4.8 as of 6/14/2003 02:00 EDT).

--
Chris BeHanna
Software Engineer                   (Remove "bogus" before responding.)
behanna at bogus.zbzoom.net
                 Turning coffee into software since 1990.