YDL 3.0: Quality of DVD playing support?

[Bill Fink]

Hi Stefan,

On Mon May 12 2003, Stefan Bruda wrote:

> At 16:14 -0700 on 2003-5-12 Rick Sheridan wrote:
>  >
>  > Use 'Xine'.  I haven't tried it on a Linux PPC machine, but I use it on an
>  > Athlon Slackware box.  Check this out from Yellow Dog Solutions:
>  > 
>  > http://www.yellowdoglinux.com/support/solutions/ydl_general/dvd.shtml
> 
> The YDL howto is somehow outdated.  I use xine 0.9.13 with the
> xine-dvdnav plugin, which if I am not mistaken is included out of the
> box in version 1.x.  This plugin uses libdvdnav and libdvdcss for
> playing encrypted DVDs with full menu support, whereas the plugin
> described in the YDL howto will not provide menu support on PPC.  See
> http://dvd.sourceforge.net/ for details and downloads.

I'd recommend getting the latest and greatest xine RPMS from:

	http://ayo.freshrpms.net/yellowdog/3.0/ppc/freshrpms/RPMS/

You only need:

	xine-lib-1.0.0-fr0.beta12.1.ppc.rpm
	xine-lib-devel-1.0.0-fr0.beta12.1.ppc.rpm	(should be optional)

This is the main xine engine.  I heartily recommend the new version.
They just added support (from the ffmpeg project) for the Sorenson
SVQ3 video codec for QuickTime media.  This will allow you to watch
QuickTime movie trailers encoded with this codec, such as the the
trailer for "The Matrix Reloaded".  You also need a GUI such as:

	xine-0.9.20-fr1.ppc.rpm

Or:

	gxine-0.3.2-fr1.ppc.rpm

I personally prefer xine-ui (the first), although if you use Gnome you
may prefer gxine.

	xine-skins-1.5-fr1.noarch.rpm			(should be optional)

This just provides additional skins for xine-ui, although I believe
you can download them directly through xine-ui also.

	libdvdcss-1.2.6-fr1.ppc.rpm
	libdvdcss-devel-1.2.6-fr1.ppc.rpm		(should be optional)

This last you will need for playing any encrypted DVDs (most commercial
DVDs are encrypted).

> If you need to install xine-dvdnav separately from xine, be careful
> with the versions: this is not documented, but anything else than an
> exact version match (e.g., xine-dvdnav 0.9.13 for xine 0.9.13) will
> not work.

If you go with the latest xine, you don't need any of xine-dvdnav,
libdvdnav, or libdvdread (or more accurately they're all already
included within xine-lib).

> For what it's worth, xine works perfectly for DVD playbak on my
> tibook, whereas both ogle and mplayer have some issues with sound
> synchronization (perhaps they can be fixed, but I did not really try
> since xine does the job quite nicely anyway).

I personally think xine is the best media (including DVD) player
available for Linux.

All that being said, the original poster said he was using a
PowerBook G3 (Pismo), and that may be on the low end of CPU horsepower
for playing DVDs (although it's worth a try since I believe someone
else reported success using xine quite some time ago on such a system,
and both xine and XFree86 have improved even more since then).

						-Bill

P.S.  It's also quite simple to build and install xine from source
      (which is what I do), but hopefully the YDL 3.0 RPMs from
      freshrpms should work just as fine (although I haven't personally
      tried using them).