The Last Frontier : a good multimedia application

[Manish Jain]

Hi all,

After weeks of fumbling and struggling, I have made my full transition 
from Linux to FreeBSD, thanks in no mean measures to the assistance of 
this forum. I've got my FreeBSD 7.1 x86 system set up exactly as I 
wanted it and now I am looking to move one step further - and that is 
one big step. I wish to get rid of my Windows installation too, which 
exists purely for the purpose of multimedia entertainment - one area 
where I think GNU-based systems still have some way to go before they 
catch up with Win32 applications.

However, I am willing to give it a try. I already have xmms set up, 
which takes care of the audio part reasonably well. The big hole that 
remains is a video application. What I looking for is something on these 
lines :

1) I hardly ever play movies directly from the CD/DVD drive (/dev/dvd -> 
/dev/acd0, courtesy devfs.conf). First I copy them to the hard-disk 
(after decrypting any DVD's if needed). So I ideally want an application 
that can play .dat and unencrypted .vob files directly from a hard disk 
ntfs partition without incessently complaining about missing plugins. 
(If necessary, I can reformat the ntfs partition as ffs). Actually, to 
be more accurate, I don't even have any .vob files. What I have is 
unencrypted .iso images of the DVD's, which I guess I will need to mount 
via mdconfig. But if the application strictly needs .vob files, I'll 
extract them from the iso images for its benefit.

2) Since my DVD drive is capable of reading DVD's from all regions, it 
would be great if the application could also, if needed, directly play 
encrypted DVD's from the drive itself. I have libdvdnav, libdvdread, 
libdvdcss and libdvdplay installed.

3) The final point to be considered is the quality of the video/audio 
playback compared to, say, PowerDVD on Windows - which I have used 
(version 2.55) with absolute delight and satisfaction since I purchased 
my first DVD.

Any tips/input would be greatly appreciated. To keep the discussion 
simple, HD/Blu-Ray are not in my plans for the current century.

-- 
Thank you and Regards
Manish Jain
invalid.pointer at gmail.com
+91-99830-62246

NB : Laast year I kudn't spell Software Engineer. Now I are won.