14 May
2003
14 May
'03
2:44 p.m.
Daniel James wrote:
Yes, Ogle rocks too. I like having the DVD menus available, and Ogle was
the first player I tried that showed them. Xine does now too.
If those
replies were at all indicative it
seems there's a 50/50 split between MPlayer and Xine for viewing
DVDs.
Not forgetting Ogle of course. it was the first to have menu support,
which is important if you have kids who like the special features and
games on DVDs. We've watched hundreds of discs using Ogle and
Blackbox, and only get
stutters if the disc has fingerprints on it. Only two discs were
unplayable - both rental copies that looked like they had been
cleaned with sandpaper - and only one crashed Ogle.
This turned out to be a manufacturing fault in that particular title,
which stopped standalone DVD players at the same point.
My local library has DVDs for circulation so I've been testing a variety
of titles. You can imagine the conditions I've encountered, but so far
only one disc has been so bad as to be unwatchable. That one was a DVD
of Bruce Lee's "Chinese Connection", it looked as though it were used in
some of the more physical scenes in the film... ;) Plus, the transfer
was awful anyway.
MPlayer, Xine, and Ogle certainly seem to disprove any notion that we're
starved for DVD player support. But I'm not at all familiar with what
software exists for Win/Mac users, and I'm not sure what they might have
that we lack. Btw, I was even able to play a DVD that would *not* play
on my girlfriend's standalone DVD player, it was a pirated copy of Vin
Diesel's "xXx" that Ivy's boy picked up somewhere. Ivy's player
wouldn't
even acknowledge the disc in the drive, but MPlayer rocked right through
it.
Best regards,
== Dave Phillips
The Book Of Linux Music & Sound at http://www.nostarch.com/lms.htm
The Linux Soundapps Site at http://linux-sound.org