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

[Kevin Oberman]

> From: Chris BeHanna <behanna at zbzoom.net>
> Date: Tue, 15 Jul 2003 17:19:47 -0400
> Sender: owner-freebsd-mobile at freebsd.org
> 
> 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.

If you use Gnome, try totem. It has full menu support and seems to
work quite well for me under CURRENT. The DVD code is from libxine. IT
plays lots of formats of video as well as audio in most formats.

I second the comment on DMA. It is critical to good playback.
-- 
R. Kevin Oberman, Network Engineer
Energy Sciences Network (ESnet)
Ernest O. Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab)
E-mail: oberman at es.net			Phone: +1 510 486-8634