Bigjohn, you need to check out
http://plf.zarb.org
This is the site that contains all the plugins etc that mandy won't put into the distro due to potential legal problems.
From memory I had to instal libdvdcss-2 to allow my dvd's to play on mplayer, the d5d plugin for xine also works well.
The details to set up plf as a urpmi source are on the site, highly recomended.

Have fun.

Thanks Chris and Chad,

That was the "crux" of the question, and of course, "better" is relative.

I have seen some of Chris's work with "acidrip" and he seems to be a bit of a "wheel" when it comes to the optical disc bases stuff!

Just a quick one, when I play a dvd under windows, if I am, say playing backgammon as well as listening/watching, I get a small amount of video/audio break up, and when I have been say listening to virgin radio with windows media and I then boot back into mandrake and then listen to virgin through real player, the audio seems to be "cleaner", well that's to say brighter and more complete with a greater depth of freq' ranges.

Would this have anything to do with drivers and stuff or maybe is it to do with the way windows uses cpu resources as opposed to mandrake/linux???

For ellyaht, thanks for that link, I'll give that a go presently.

regards

John

p.s. shame there isn't a smiley that has a "mortarboard", the study one is as close as I can get

I've just had a quick look at ellyaht's link. I thought the "plf" had disappeared into cyber space ages ago???

regards

John

Most likely due to hardware usage such as proper RAM usage and CPU bog downs. Also, linux takes full advantage of all your resources, so I'm sure that helps as well (where windoze does it's best to not use your resources, just different schools of thought).

Cool