Hi

I have a couple of problems and i would appericiate any help to this.


#1
I have problem with playing DVDs in Fedora Core 6. I have installed mplayer and vlc, they both run fine and im able to play for ex. DVDs, but when a DVD is playing in either vlc or mplayer its lagging, does someone know how to fix that so the DVD is running smoothly and not lagging?

#2
I have a buddy who is using linux with the distribution elive. This distribution have built-in support so you can play netradios that is using windows media player. He thinks the distribution is crashing a little to much and may want to change to another distribution, but i he dont wanna change unless netradios with windows media player is working in the other linux distribution.

I know you can install vlc and mplayer with win32 codecs, but eventhough ive have installed it as described in the manual, i cannot get the netradios that is using windows media player to work in fedora core 6, i get no sound and the message "You need to install windows media player ..". I think i read on the net (in these forums) that these win32 codecs will pretty much only work with windows media 9 (i have no reference to this thread where i read this), so then its kind of a wonder how its working in elive. I have anyway not got it working.


Does someone know how to fix these problems?

#1 make sure you are using proper display drivers for your card; the file where they are configured in is /etc/X11/xorg.conf for Fedora 6 I suppose. See section "Device" for the driver; it ought to be something different than vesa, for example ATI radeons it's radeon or if you've installed 3d drivers, fglrx. Or for nvidia cards, nv if you've got the drivers. vesa means sluggish playback. Another thing to make sure is that you have libdvdcss2 installed; I'm not sure if it affects the playback except that some movies you buy might not play in your Fedora unless you've got it installed.

#2 Find out what exactly is in the other distribution that is used to play the net radios. Then simply install that on Fedora or some other distribution and you should be fine. It's probably not a player, but a plugin or extra codec; w32codecs don't work for all players, for example Xine uses libxine-extracodecs and Gstreamer uses gstreamer-plugins-somename where somename is one of the plugin pack names, like ugly for example.

For Fedora Core 6 also get the codecs;

Visit http://rpm.pbone.net/
Search for: mplayer-codecs-20060611-1.i386.rpm and mplayer-codecs-extras-20060611-1.i386.rpm
Download both and install; rpm -ivh mplayer-codecs*.rpm

#1
In my device section i have "i810" since i have an intel based graphics card and i have the libdvdcss package installed.

#2
Is there any specific place i should look, like for ex. /usr/local/lib/win32 / /usr/locaL/lib/codecs ? That would be the path for the codecs (usually) with mplayer, but it might be other codecs the distribution is using and then its like trying to find gold on the screen (where should i look you know).

Ill try that, but what is "mplayer-codecs-extras-20060611-1.i386.rpm", i already have the essential codec package for mplayer. Thanks for that resource.

Lenard: I got this message when searching at the site: "Your query mplayer-codecs-extras-20060611-1.i386.rpm did not match any entry in database". I also tried the other radiobuttons to see if i found it that way, but didnt. Not in google either.

The other package requires this (and i have 1.0rc1 installed which should be higher?):
mplayer >= 1.0pre7

I have been searching on the net for a while now and found out that i think its that DMA is not turned on the DVD-rom or something wrong with the codecs and i have checked that DMA is turned off on the DVD-rom, so its probably that. I have tried to turn DMA on by using the "hdparm" command, but i only get an "Operation not permitted" error message. I looked at a guide here on linuxquestions and havent got the time to read through it yet, but seems like the same problem.

Does someone know how to easily turn on DMA on a DVD-rom drive without having to recompile the linux kernel? If im way off here, then please tell me

Sorry my mistake it is actually mplayer-codecs-extra-20060611-1.i386.rpm

As far as the DMA issue, if your having a problem with the DVD drive and DMA then your mostly likely having a problem with DMA on the IDE buses in general. What hardware do you have, check the output (as root) /sbin/hdaprm -tT /dev/hda (if this is one of the possible drives), for example;

Actually this really is an ATA/ATAPI/IDE drive on an Acer Aspire 5000WLMi notebook, but with the new kernels (like that latest at Fedora Development) the ATA/ATAPI?IDE drives now SCSI(pata) devices, this fixes a number of issues with some hardware and DMA issues.

I have mplayer version 1.0rc1, the latest version and when im trying to install the rpm package named "mplayer-codecs-extra" im getting this error:
"Missing Dependency: mplayer >= 1.0pre7 is needed by package mplayer-codecs-extra"
I dont understand why im getting this error when i have an mplayer version that is higher than 1.0pre7.

The output from hdparm was:
I have been looking for more information about this problem, i have seen that other people having this problem has compiled in support for their chipsets. I have an intel chipset, i guess its "ICH7" that is the chipset i need support for, i take this information from the results of this command:
/sbin/lspci -v | grep -i ide
00:1f.2 IDE interface: Intel Corporation 82801GBM/GHM (ICH7 Family) Serial ATA Storage Controller IDE (rev 01) (prog-if 80 [Master])

I have checked the kernel configuration and saw that i could add support for this chipset, but i also saw that it already was marked, so i dont know if it would make any difference.

So, the two questions on the first post is still not answered with working solutions. Where do i go from here, it should be easy to get a simple DVD to play smoothly in linux shouldnt it? Getting a little tired of this, i only want to play a DVD here! I understand why some people think linux is a little too tricky sometimes.

However, does someone have any solutions/any more tips/guidelines or whatever...would really appericate help so i can fix these problems

Update: The second problem is solved.
New update: The first problem has now been solved.

All problems solved.