Playing DVD

[Aaron Peterson]

>   I've  followed  the  instruction  in  the handbook regarding playing
>   DVDs,  but  the  playback  is  still  not as smooth as I had it when
>   running on a Windows box. What steps can be taken to achieve a still
>   better quality?

If you are using mplayer you should try using an excellerated video driver
for one, instead of taking the default.  XV is a good one if your video
card supports it.  second you might try caching some of the dvd before it
starts to play.  this way it keeps a buffer in memory that is quicker to
read from than the dvd by itself.  then you might also try the framedrop
option, so when your machine can't keep up with the dvd information it
drops frames a bit more gracefully and you won't see as many jerky starts
and stops.  this might look something like the following:

mplayer -vo xv -cache 8192 -framedrop dvd://

For more information on these options and others, you could check out
"man mplayer"

Aaron