Playing video files directly from a DVD (avi, mpeg, etc.)
 

I'm sure someone will know the answer to this question, however, the use of video files being rather new to me, I haven't been able to find a solution to this problem. Here goes...

I've downloaded a bunch of silent films (with musical accompaniment), cartoons, documentaries, etc - which are all in the public domain, of course - , have burned them onto a DVD and would like to be able to view them directly from the DVD. The videos start, but then stop a few seconds later. I can then hear the DVD trying to load the data or at least that's what it sounds like it's trying to do... I've looked in the options and preferences in VCL and a few other players but haven't been able to find a solution.

I could just copy the files onto the desktop and play them, but is there an option in the video players that allows you to load the video before playing it? Or, is there another way around this problem? It would be inconvenient to always have to copy the files onto the desktop because a lot of them are very short (5 minute cartoons, etc.). What would be best is to just play them in VLC and to select them from a playlist.

Many thanks.

I will take a guess and say that your machine is short on memory. In Linux memory that is not in active use gets used for buffers and cache. If there is minimal memory there is none left over for buffers and cache, so you wind up with a direct read from the drive instead of a buffered read.

Hmmm... I'm not talking about a standard DVD here, just a bunch of short video files, avi's mpeg4's... all burned onto a DVD... Actually, loading a bunch of them onto the desktop in a directory I've created called 'video-temps' solves the problem. It takes about 10 minutes to load 2 or 3 hours of videos. I can then open them directly from the desktop directory. I was just curious to know if there was a way to read the files directly from the DVD without copying them to the actual computer and for everything to work okay. Perhaps a multimedia player setting and/or an alternative means of burning the files? Perhaps all of this is normal, anything being read from a DVD is going to be slower, much slower than if it is read directly from the HD.

Perhaps there's no solution. If anyone knows any more about this, I'd certainly appreciate your help, otherwise, copying the files onto the HD is okay too...

Many thanks.

Sounds like dma is not enabled on your drive install the hdparm program and use a command like this hdparm /dev/hda changing the hda part to the actual drive as it is accessed if you see a dma 0 then use hdparm -d1 /dev/hda again changing to the proper drive to set it then try again. Now in Debian you would edit the file /etc/hdparm.conf to add a section like this to have it set on every boot.

For other distro not sure how they do it, you could add the command hdparm -d1 /dev/hda to some startup file to set it.