[ILUG] Playing DVDs with MPlayer

[Gavin McCullagh]

Hi,
	just thought I'd let those of you who were on this thread that I
recently did manage to get DVD working *well* on a P2 400MHz and more
importantly what I had to do.  

	Some had suggested sound drivers were inadequate.  Having had a
very kind loan of an SBLive from Liam I know that this made no noticeable
difference at all.  So I went back to using my Aureal Vortex 1.

	As he and several others did point out, hardware assistance is best
used by Xine.  I went to the xine website and downloaded the latest source.
the binary from debian is some way behind, don't know about the others.
Anyway, I compiled & installed the various libs and so forth required
xine-ui, libxine, libpng etc.  I had done apt-get install xine before and
found it seg-faulted on me and did bugger all in general.  I had gotten it
to vaguely watchable but a bit jumpy with mplayer.

	Xine appears to have improved quite a way though since then.  It
plays DVD without any problems.  It drops a frame noticeably maybe once
every 5-10 minutes which I can handle.  I may try optimizing for 686 etc to
squeeze a little more out of it, but it's pretty good as it stands.  This
is with the zoran module which supports my hardware DVD card.

	So if you're having similar problems, it's very doable on such a 
machine, get the latest source for xine and compile it, mplayer is not as 
good it would appear.  I'm using the "nvidia" drivers made by NVidia which 
are a distance ahead of the XFree "nv" driver. 

	Thanks for all the help, particularly to Liam,

Gavin