I have a couple of questions about video on my system. I just installed Redhat 8, and then I installed mplayer to watch videos and dvd's. When I select an mpeg video for example, I'll hear sound, but the video is just black. How can I see the video? Also, when I try to load a dvd, it says it can't find /dev/dvd. If I have a DVD-ROM then how do I get it mounted as that instead of /dev/cdrom?

My second question is on games. When I try to play any of the bigger games like Tux Racer, my system slows to a crawl. My CPU and memory shoot up to 100% and the game crawls at like 1 frame a second (it seems). Why is it so bad? I can play much more intense games with Windoze. I have an Athlon XP 1800 (1.53GHZ) with 512 megabytes of Crucial memory. Thanks in advance.

2: Well, what hardware do you have? If you have an NVidia based card, you need to download the NVidia drivers and install them. There have been many, many, many threads on the hows and whys of NVidia drivers on this site, so go forth and search! Ofcourse, if you don't have an NVidia card, then letting us know what you have would be good...

Ah yes, that's right. No actually I have an ATI Radeon 8500 with 64 megs of ram. I remember seeing that driver that they made for Linux on their site. Thanks for reminding me.

look in your fstab check your settings. You should have a line that says something like this:

/dev/cdrom /mnt/cdrom UDF noauto,owner,kudzu,ro 0$

make sure that the it says UDF in that line not ISO9660 or something like that. That tells it that it is a dvd not cdrom.

then cd to /dev and type "ls -al dvd"

you should get a line like this:

lrwxrwxrwx 1 root root 5 Oct 8 19:45 dvd -> cdrom

the dvd -> cdrom means dvd is a symbolic link to cdrom which is also probably a sym link to hdb or hdc, depending on how many hd's you have.

let me know what you find.

Not sure on the video issue. I am guessing something you don't have the right video drivers specified in your XF86config. But, that is just a guess

You could also try putting auto in instead of either iso9660 or udf. That way you should be able to see and use both.

Still a no-go. I tried everything you guys both suggested. In using UDF it would tell me that line 6 in fstab was bad. When I changed to auto, it would tell me that /dev/dvd wasn't found in fstab. Also when I tried to list everything in /dev/dvd it told me that it found no file or directory. I also tried using the terminal to: mount -t udf -o ro /dev/dvd /dev/cdrom and it told me that udf was not supported by the kernel. Any suggestions?

I downloaded and installed the rpm driver for my ATI card, but the game still plays just as sluggish. Playing mpegs in mplayer works, but it was probably because I tweaked the preferences and chose a different codec or something.

Ok, try mounting the specific device, rather than attempting to mount the symlink. I have both /dev/dvd and /dev/hdd, and sometimes one works where the other might fail. Type dmesg and search through its output for something that gives you a hint about which device it is. When I looked at mine, I had two lines that looked particularly helpful:
hdd: AOpen Inc. DVD-ROM DVD-1040 PRO 0125, ATAPI CD/DVD-ROM drive
and
hdd: ATAPI DVD-ROM drive, 512kB Cache, UDMA(33)