Hello:

I have a Dell Laptop running Fedora Core 2. It is equipped with a CD-R/DVD combination drive. Fedora recognizes the CD-R part of the drive and creates appropriate entries in fstab and /dev/cdrom. I can burn regular CD's. However, there is no mention of a DVD device or any reference in fstab. I wanted to play movies with XINE.

I am able to view DVD quality MPG files saved to the hard drive with XINE, but it will not recognize a DVD disk placed in the drive.

Do I have to mount the DVD as a separate device? Is there something special you must do with a combination device?

Thanks,
Ross

it is mentioned in the xine FAQs.
you will need to link /dev/dvd to your cdr/dvdrom because that is where xine looks for dvd media (/dev/dvd)

hope this helps

I've got a desktop with a similar configuration, usually I open a terminal and use this command

ln -s hdc /dev/dvd

the hdc (which it is for me) is whatever device your cd-rw/dvd drive is.
It is somewhat goofy how you have to juggle this, but its not really a problem for me, I've got a cd-rw drive and the cd-rw/dvd drive for a total of 2 seperate drives, so I've got one assigned as the cdrom only and the other as the dvd only. There has to be an easier way to do this, so that linux sees the dvd combo drive as a combo drive and not just one or the other. But use that command as su from the terminal and you should be in business!

On my system the cdrom is hdb so I typed the command

ln -s hdb /dev/dvd

as you suggested. Nothing really happened. I believe I have all the plug ins installed, but the drive never spins. If I use XINE's CD or VCD buttons, the drive spins, but states it contains no readable media. The DVD button does nothing.

Any other thoughts?

Thanks,
Ross

hmm... well the normal string of commands that I run in the terminal when I reboot my computer is as follows

chmod a+rw /dev/hdd
to change the permissions of the device

ln -s hdd /dev/dvd
to tell xine that hdd is the dvd drive

export LD_LIBRARY_PATH=/usr/local/lib:$LD_LIBRARY_PATH
and to point xine to the xine-lib.

I realize that I can put these commands in the rc.local file so that I don't have to do that everytime I reboot.

If none of that helps, then maybe MPLayer would be a good option for you. Other than it sometimes dying when I maximize some Sea Lab episodes, I've always had good luck with Mplayer.

Good luck man