[ILUG] General DVD question?

[Breathnach, Proinnsias (Dublin)]

OK,

At the moment there are a few cards supported, most notable is the Creative
DXR2 card, which is a bit of a pain to get a hold of. Picture quality to a
TV is good, although it requires a special connector (mail me for the wiring
Specs if you want them). 
opensource.creative.com have drivers for the DXR2, they require a kernel
patched to support the DVD IOCTLS and the UDF filesystem (patches readily
available). The main problem I've had is getting my hands on a pristine
enough source tree (no worthwhile connection at home ....)

RH/MDK/SuSE kernel sources do not patch cleanly, although once you get the
re-compile working, all is sweetness.

Video overlay in X (or now on the console !!) is reasonable, there are a few
problems configuring it to fit your particular display settings, they are
working on this.

CSS is done in hardware on the DXR2, and it is effectively region free
(EEPROM region coding, reset automatically by the dvdplayer software)

Hope this helps ...

Proinnsias
> -----Original Message-----
> 
> I know that there is a lot of discussion about DVD on Linux and am quite
> aware
> of the unjust apprehension of people and equipment. But I have a question?
> 
> Is it possible to just buy a DVD decoder card for your PC and use that for
> watching DVD's? As I understand it, purchasing one of these cards buys the
> licence to decode and watch DVD's. I would still like to see the court
> case
> won, but for the short-term, gotta have it now answer, I was hoping to
> just buy
> a card, slot it in and watch my DVD's.
>