Play DVDs On Linux

mojo-raisin writes: "After more than a year of development, the first release of OMS has been made on www.linuxvideo.org. For those of you running Debian see this message for an easy installation to your system." Looks like you need a cutting-edge libc6, among other things.

Hey! I've been playing DVDs for months!

I use xine [sourceforge.net] since the early 0.3.x releases and it works really well! I can get a perfect fullscreen playback at 1280x960 (thanks xv!) with a NVidia GeForce 2 MX on a P3 550. The latest version now supports subtitles and changing audio tracks on the fly (earlier versions started supporting IFO parsing, very useful too)... everything I need!
There's even an "unofficial" input plugin to play encrypted DVDs which works perfectly.
I really love this piece of software, it's wonderful :-)

BTW, RedHat 7 users can get a clean custom packaged version from http://redhat.aldil.org/ [aldil.org] and play all their DVDs in no time!

Perhaps

Perhaps it's illegal, sort of like wearing pants on sunday in montana is illegal (or whatever...)

But let the cops come to take me away for playing a DVD I purchased on a DVD-ROM drive that I purchased. Let the judge throw me in jail with a straight face.

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Re:Lovely DVD

I can't decide which I like best -- the D's or
the V between them.

I still like VideoLan

VideoLan [videolan.org] uses SDL and plays very smoothly on my 500Mhz laptop, can play directly from encrypted DVDs, and it doesn't require jumping through a lot of hoops to get compiled/running. It's usable now, releases come in reasonable timeframes, and it keeps getting better, I'll stick with it.

LinuxVideo? No. VideoLan, Yes!

I was pretty disappointed with LinuxVideo (LiVid) as I only got 6 fps TOPS on a Duron 700, however, a discrete link in a recent Slashdot story linked to VideoLan.org [videolan.org], and THEY have a client that works and works SPLENDIDLY. I got FULL framerate and EXCELLENT AUDIO as well. I've never turned back!

Dummy, you bought the wrong card.

I bought a dvd-rom and a matrox card. With both of them came a WinDVD player. I bought a copy of Matrix.

Well what the hell did you expect? You expect to view Matrix with a Matrox card?
Next time read the fine print. To view Matrix, buy a Matrix card. Damn.

Many options for DVD on Linux

I don't mean to try and take away from the LiViD team. They were the first to start working on a DVD player for linux, and there work has provided the basis but there are several other DVD players for linux. But there are other players which many have reported to be better than oms in the areas of configuration, performance and audio sync. One of these is call VideoLAN [videolan.org] which several others have mentioned. It now has css support much like OMS and the performance is suppose to be quite good on lower end system. VideoLAN is not quite as old as OMS but the source was only made available more recently hence less exposure. I believe most of the code in VideoLAN was developed independently of LiViD code except css of course. There is another which has called Xine [sourceforge.net] which is the newest one but reported to be one of the best. I believe this one used the LiVid video and sound system but has tweaked synchronization and performance as well as adding some other feature. This one is also designed to be compatible across several free unix type platforms including *BSD. Note that the standard version of Xine does not come with css support but it can be added with a plugin from here [nbci.com] as well as a version with the plugin already built in here [ist.utl.pt]. Again what LiViD has done is great but competition as always is good. The only thing I would like to see is some unified plugin standard for these players so that any css plugin could work with any of the DVD players. That way if new DVD's come out that break the current CSS updates could occur much easier for all the projects.

Re:yeah, but can I pirate videos with this.

d00d! u must use the l33t w4r3zing tool "dd", like this: "dd if=/dev/dvd of=thematrix.dvd. It is so il33gal! We must ban "dd" now!!!!1 h0llyw00d needs rights!!!!1

You criminals sicken me.

Your illegal DVD software epitomizes the lawnessness, anarchic nature of Linux and free software users across the world.

You are the reason why our great nation is facing difficult economic times right now. The way you flout the DVD Consortium and the Hollywood studios angers me to no end, and you are an embarassment to the millions of honest, hardworking American citizens who view DVDs using LEGAL hardware or software.

And it only took you guys about four or five years after DVDs first came out.

Why go to these lengths simply to break the law?

I will never understand you people.

Thank you, and God bless America.

--
George W. Bush
President, United States of America
--
George W. Bush

Re:What to buy?

Does anyone have a good recommendation for a good DVD player? Creative seems fairly popular, but I'm curious as to what the alterantives are

I've owned several, and the ones I have been most happy with are Pioneer's models and the Ricoh CDRW/DVD combo drives.

Go here [firmware.com.bi] to make sure that a modified version of the firmware for you drive is availble so you can easily play discs from more than one region. The Ricoh drives are especially nice because they are not region free, but region switchable, with the propper firmware modification. Region switchable is preferred to region free because some recent discs can detect if your DVD drive is region free and will refuse to play if it is. Region switchable drives avoid that problem. There are other drives that are region switchable, the Ricoh ones just happen to be the ones I am familiar with.

Re:DVD Player Compatibility

You got it wrong. The article that you probably read was about the Apple DVD-R recorder which is not playable on some consumer (and some PC's) DVD players - which is true. Some of the old DVD players cannot read DVD-R CD's.

Oh, and the DVD-R cd's got the CSS ring (the place where the CSS authentication data is stored) blocked, and the DVD-R storage is smaller then the normal DVD media itself - so no DVD's media copying... (hmm, they probably didn't hear that DivX with small compression ratio can give some excellent results.. oh well - maybe they'll get it some day)

It is anticompetitive

CSS encoding is a completely anticompetitive practice. The way it works is as follow:

1. the disk contains a private key to decrypt it. This key is encoded 400 times by 400 different keys that match 400 possible licencee (note that the 400 number as to be checkd, but you get the deal)
2. a manufacturer that get it own DVD license get it's own key that match one of the keys mentionned above.
3. when the DVD player want to decrypt the disk, it fetch the disc key using its lincencee key and decrypt the MPEG steam with it

Now imagine that the World Company that have almost 80% of the video publishing companies as well as several DVD Player manufacturer wants to make it's main competitor (ACME DVD, a DVD player manufacturer) bites the dust. In this case the World Company only have to remove the ACME DVD CSS key from their DVD disc, so that WC DVD cannot be played on ACME DVD.

Don't you find this unfair ?

On the other side, CSS does not prevent raw copy of DVD, hence it does not offer a good copy protection scheme.

And I don't find decrypting a DVD to play it when we have purchased it legally is violating author's right. After all buying the DVD gives us the right to watch it as much as we want, when we want, where we want (unless it is public broadcasting or other condition prohibited by law).

Wow.

First of all, I find it rather disturbing how some people seem to be really ignorant.

We (the people) are allowed to 'view' our purchased DVDs based the the fair use law! No ands, ifs, or buts.

Now to quote you, "No it's illegal like stealing cable is illegal".

If you are paying for Cable-TV, you are ALLOWED BY LAW to be able to DESCRABLE IT. Just so long as you dont descramble the channels you are NOT paying for. Look it up, and make more informed posts next time.

To give you a little history... There one was a time when Telephone companies tried to charge you for each phone you had installed on the SAME line. You had to also purchase the telephone directly from the phone company. The courts thought otherwise. This same case was used towards the cable companies as well. Now, you are ALLOWED to purchase your own telephone just like you can purchase your own cable descambler independent from the phone/cable companies. Just as long you were PAYING for service.

Re:Perhaps

Because we won't surrender our rights to proprietary software [gnu.org]. I'm sure the MPAA would love to collude with Bill Gates and Steve Jobs(MPAA member) to make it impossible to view DVDs except for in very controlled conditions. We're making sure that will neve happen.

OMS Features

One of the lead LiViD developers has posted [linuxvideo.org] a descriptive list of features in OMS/OMI. It also lists the near-term developement goals.

what about picture quality?

While I'm glad to see that we've finally got viable DVD players for my favourite OS, I wonder about the picture quality. My (uber-picky) graphics person and I got a Mitsubishi Diamond Pro 2040u and a Mitsubishi Plus 200, respectivly. Both are 22", super flat screens. His is running off a 400Mhz G4 with MacOS and the stock video card (ATI Rage 128 Pro, I believe). I'm running a Guillemot 32MB Geforce2 MX on an Athlon 600 (not T-bird).

We played the Matrix on both, first the G4 (Apple DVD Player). Oh my God, I had to change my shorts and take a long shower. This was the best picture I have ever seen. I would swear watching full screen (1600x1200) from the G4 was comparable to being in the theatre as far as picture quality and lack of artifacts goes. We also watched a 320x240 quicktime of Battle Angel Alita, blown up to full screen. The ATI card apearently has a video scaling chip in it, the lack of artifacts (there were still some, heh it was 320x240), and the color quality was exellent.

We tested the Matrix on my box under Win2K and the WinDVD 2.3 software DVD player. Less clarity, colors were a little washed out comparitively (yes we tweaked contrast and brightness on monitor and in DVD player), and the video jittered every now and then (the G4 was as smooth as ).

I'm pretty sure that my hardware has the horsepower to hold it's own against the Apple solution, but they really put a lot of quality into they're software when it comes to multimedia applications.

I just hope that the resources being thrown at Linux DVD don't slow down at 'ok we did it'. IMNSHO, Apple's platform has set a high standard, which is why my graphics developer uses Adobe products on MacOS rather than GIMP and friends on Linux (He does a lot of high end print and 3D work, not just web design).

Besides I'm really tired of running over and having him check out the latest and greatest achievements from the Open Source community, just to have him yawn and produce a list of lacking features and quality. It's making me look bad dammit!!!

But in seriousness, this is great, just as I applaud every release of GIMP, GNOME, KDE and many of the other awesome projects that make using UNIX systems easier, I really must produce a sober reminder that we still aren't the best, or even in running for the top spot, when it comes to quality and richness of features in multimedia stuff.

These are the same reasons that Windows never won over the graphics market (surprise, it wasn't just fanaticism), so we really can't feel bad, the bar is that high.

I hope that one day soon my graphics developer will thank me when I put Yellow Dog or LinuxPPC on his G4. I've already got it on my 1999 PowerBook (did I mention Apple makes great hardware)

So thanks for everyones hard work, it's looking like a great start.

LiViD Performance

The performance of oms is a bit disappointing, imo. Using a 1 GHz athlon with 256 megs of ram, under gnome in redhat 7, the dvd's framerate fluctuates between 20 and 24 fps. After a while, sound tends to desynchronize itself (using the 2.4 kernel's sblive! driver), and about halfway through a dvd, it stops playing.

After reading a post here, I decided to give xine a try. It's much better. Video is smooth, sound syncs better, and I can watch the end of my dvd's!

One less reason to reboot into windows...

ck

link to the official announcement

There is also an official announcement [linuxvideo.org] for OMS [linuxvideo.org].

Summary

It seems we have gone from none to too many movie solutions for the free unices. I am amazed at the sheer amount of duplication, but I guess that is the way we do things in the free software world.

GPL Movie systems listed from most mature to least, imo:

• Xine:
  • http://gape.ist.utl.pt/ment00/linuxdvd.html [ist.utl.pt]
  • http://xine.sourceforge.net/ [sourceforge.net]
• OMS/LiViD:
  • http://www.linuxvideo.org/ [linuxvideo.org]
• XMovie:
  • http://heroinewarrior.com/xmovie.php3 [heroinewarrior.com]
• XTheater:
  • http://xtheater.sourceforge.net/ [sourceforge.net]

Re:Why do Linux users assume...

While the posting I am responding to was an absurd troll, it's possible that someone might take it seriously, so I'll respond to be on the safe side.

Once you buy a DVD, you own it and, and of course you have the right to view it. Of course, all rights must be balanced against other rights (e.g. freedom of assembly can be regulated to ensure public safety). It's absurd to compare playing a DVD you've purchased to shooting your own children.

The issues you raise about "script kiddies threatening the format" are off-base. DVD's can be copied without decrypting them, simply by duplicating them, and in fact well before CSS was cracked DVD's were widely pirated outside of the US because it's so easy (and DVD's are relatively overpriced compared to manufacturing costs). The only thing that encrypting DVD's does is make it difficult to produce a DVD player that doesn't enforce the region coding and licensing fees, and create all sorts of hassles for consumers of the sort that killed off the DAT format (where you often couldn't even copy your own personal recordings).

Keep in mind that many other media formats have succeeded without any encryption: radio, TV, newspapers, books, CD's, LP's, cassette tapes, VHS, laserdisk ... you get the idea. There's nothing new about DVD's that innately requires the manufacturer's rights to expand and the consumers' rights to be more restricted -- they're just taking advantage of a shift in technology to attempt to create new rights for themselves. And since those rights are based on trade secrets and not legal rights, it's just fine for people to counter that effort.

Re:I dont mind encrypted DVD's

I dont mind encrypted DVD's what I object to is the region coding. I understand perfectly why an artist, a studio or a softwaredeveloper wants to keep his/her movie/music/software from being pirated. After all they did put alot of effort, money, creativity and brainpower into producing it and want to be able to live off the results of their labour. Just like I (or any of I assume) do not want to slave away for years to pay for a car only to have it stolen a week after buying it. I do not save for a car so that some lazy bastard can get a car for free.

What bugs me is this whole reginon code nonsense. There is really no reason for it to exist other than to create artificial trade barriers. I do not mind paying for DVD movies but I will continue to approve of efforts like OMS while idiotic schemes like Region codes continue to come out of messed up brains of Hollywood beancounters.



For better or for worse, Da Rabbit has spoken!!

Support for dxr3 (Hollywood+)!

It isn't mentioned on the Livid-site (they mention support for dxr2, but not dxr3), but there IS an OMS-plugin for RealMagic Hollywood and Creative dxr3 -cards here [sourceforge.net]. Don't know why the OMS-site doesn't seem to know about it though.

Re:You criminals sicken me.

> You are the reason why our great nation is facing difficult economic times right now.

What ? Our Great Nation - Rhubarbhia - is doing just fine... Or are you a FOREIGNER ?

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