Our plans for Friday evening were ruined by the heat, so instead we ate some DiGiorno Pizza and chilled out with our computers upstairs in the A/C.
I needed a project.
I’ve had this DVD-ROM sitting on my desk for over a month.
The only other option was R2Q5. R2Q5 is my old workstation (and used to be Xelium IRC server), 450 mhz, 256M ram, 4M GFX card. I’d played DVDs back in Windows98 when I first bought the machine, so I figured it’d work OK. And I’d never played DVDs in linux, so I thought it’d be fun.
There are several media players that play DVDs in Linux, so I figured I could get at least one to run properly.
I started out with Totem because it’s installed in Ubuntu. I put the DVD in, and Totem froze up badly. It must have left things running after I closed the window for it because the whole machine was inexcusably sluggish after that, I could barely open a gnome-terminal. I finally just rebooted because debugging what went wrong was taking too long. Later in the evening I tried it again, this time launching it from a terminal so I could see the issues:
** Message: don't know how to handle video/mpeg, mpegversion=(int)2, systemstream=(boolean)false
** Message: don't know how to handle video/x-dvd-subpicture
** Message: don't know how to handle video/x-dvd-subpicture
** Message: don't know how to handle audio/x-ac3
** Message: don't know how to handle audio/x-ac3
** Message: don't know how to handle audio/x-ac3
I installed a bunch more codecs to see if I could find the right one. Googled a bunch. No luck. Totem has a GUI overhead though, so I figured it’d be to heavy anyway.
So I installed good ole mplayer. I got these errors:
X11 error: BadAlloc (insufficient resources for operation)
MPlayer interrupted by signal 6 in module: flip_page
- MPlayer crashed. This shouldn't happen.
It can be a bug in the MPlayer code _or_ in your drivers _or_ in your
gcc version. If you think it's MPlayer's fault, please read
DOCS/HTML/en/bugreports.html and follow the instructions there. We can't and
won't help unless you provide this information when reporting a possible bug.
successfully enabled DPMS
Xlib: unexpected async reply (sequence 0x7a)!
I really should have been smart enough to realize at this point that the “BadAlloc (insufficient resources for operation)” was the key to my issues.
Next I installed xine. That didn’t give errors so much as just failed to do anything when it got to:
libdvdread: Get key for /VIDEO_TS/VTS_07_1.VOB at 0x0024ecc4
libdvdread: Elapsed time 0
libdvdread: Found 7 VTS's
libdvdread: Elapsed time 0
At this point I was slightly annoyed. I’d googled all over the place and gotten solutions about installing this or that codecs, making sure it’s the right version, and other such nonsense. Why is this so hard?
Then I used
X Error of failed request: BadAlloc (insufficient resources for operation)
Major opcode of failed request: 141 (XVideo)
Minor opcode of failed request: 19 ()
Serial number of failed request: 58
Current serial number in output stream: 58
Duh. R2Q5 is an old machine, His graphics card is one we just found in
one of our hardware boxes and was good enough for when he was just a little old server. Who knows what happened to the 8meg card that I had in him when I ran DVDs ok in Win98. So I reduced the resolution to 640×480 and dropped the color to 16 bit. Restarted X.
Totem still had the same problem it did at bigger resolution. mplayer tried to play it, I could see some things, but finally crashes due to frame dropping (not unusual since I played the /dev/dvd, mplayer doesn’t much like dvd menus, I might have had more luck using dvd:// and finding the proper file to play, but I didn’t bother). ogle seemed to work, but the screen size was so small that half the picture went off the side of my screen, fullscreen mode was even worse. Finally xine worked, even with dvd menus, and after some moving around of the window it didn’t cut much of the movie off.
But it looked lousy. Jittery, not rendering well. It was watchable, but annoying. I went to the xine site’s speed fixes but I was already doing pretty much everything they suggested that was easy to do.
So R2Q5’s graphics card is too old. It’s not even worth the effort of finding a cheap old graphics card that’s slightly better than this one to use. Afterall, this is just my test machine and this was another test, the DVD-Rom won’t stay in this machine for long.
I wouldn’t call this adventure a complete failure though. I now know something about DVD playback in Linux, and although I’m a devoted mplayer user, I think xine will be my dvd player from now on.