[ILUG] DVD info, if you're interested :)

[Gavin McCullagh]

On Fri, 01 Feb 2002, Ronny B. wrote:

> > I've a PII 350, it's actually a Dual with two PII 350's, but as I can not get 
> > a kernel to compile and run I can't use the SMP yet :(
> I've seen people just barely run Xine with a single PIII 450 - if you get 
> SMP working, it might help a bit. At least one of the major video decoder
> libraries is multithreaded.

Mine's a PII 400, but I've only played it in two situations:

* an ATI AIW Rage128 32MB (which includes hardware DVD)

* an Nvidia 8MB card with a separate Zoran Hardware DVD card.

It plays fine.

I'll be honest I havn't tried without hardware, I must do that and see what
happens, it's pretty difficult for me to tell whether it's really using the 
cards and what difference it's making.  I use Xine though, which was
rumoured on the list as being best at taking advantage of hardware DVD.
I presume Ogle isn't actually an MP application or is it?  In the end, you
can shift the X server (not small) and other system requirements onto the
other cpu, but you do still need one cpu capable of running the dvd player.

> > ogle reports a frame rate of about 9-11 fps if I run it from the command 
> > line. It gives quite a bit of debuggin info while it runs in this mode. It 
> > might be faster run from the menu. I haven't timed it :)
> Don't worry about that; it makes no discernible difference if you print to
> the console. The main CPU hog is not the decoding, either - it's the block
> transfer from decoded data to the display.
> 
> > I also tried xine and mplayer, but neither seem to be able to decrypt the 
> > DVD. ogle does this just fine.
> libdvdcss 1.0.0, libdvdread 0.9.2?

I at one stage googled across the elusive Captain CSS who moves from free host 
to free host righting wrongs, robbing from the rich to give to the poor etc.  
He also offers xine_d4d_plugin-0.2.6.tar.gz .  This allows Xine to decrypt 
encrypted DVDs.  It can play unencrypted ones anyway.

> If you're using only one at a time, you're safe. Is your motherboard UDMA 
> 33 capable? My previous DVD, a 6x Creative, managed 23MB/s in read tests
> on an older motherboard (1998 make).

Getting UDMA working and 32-bit I/O support etc is important.  It brought
me from skipping constantly to working moreorless fine.

Gavin