Hi new user to linux and of all the different flavours of linux can anyone recommend a distro that will handle streaming media well,play dvds and be simple to use?I've tried FC 3 and that had an issue with my raid card(MegaRaid)Ubuntu I am running at the moment(cant get it to play dvds)and I also dual boot between Windoze and Suse 10 across 3 scsi disks and suse wont play dvds either!I was thinking of Mepis any ideas please?
Regards John

Haven't tried Mepis, but I'd guess your problems across all distros with lack of DVD playback is down to libdvdcss support (or rather, lack of). By default, distros can't include this during install, as it basically circumvents the DVD encryption on your DVD movies. It's easy to install at a later date, and most distros will have pre-compiled packages for you.

Hi!

I have Fedora Core 2 with kernel 2.6.14.3, I use MPlayer with some fancy frontends and I can play almost all video formats, I can play DVDs VCDs SVCDs and can rip them in really high quality.

I think u can use almost any of the distros. If you power it up with MPlayer with some of the frontends/home enetertainment systems you can use it for multimedia.

I have my machine connected to my TV, and I love it. It's much better then any single DVD-player (mostly because I can rip DVDs into ,say, mpeg4/libav keep the 5.1 surround sound and can burn 4-5 movies on one DVD).

Take a look at h**p://www.mplayerhq.hu and try it. IT'S THE BEST movie player.
If you have some trouble with it, please let me know.

good luck

hi there
myself amarinder from india. i have just installed linux enterprise and having problems with multimedia files. i downloaded mplayer and am not able to configure. it is asking for libpng - dev for GUI support and says that it is not there. i have checked that i have it installed.

please suggest some measure.

thanks

Maybe you should simply build the latest release of libpng, or run mplayer from the command-line, it's not that hard.

Good luck.

Another thing... If you can use kde-stuff, you should try some frontends for mplayer (e.g. kmplayer or kplayer), they use KDE's libs for windowing, therefor if you can use KDE you should be able to run these frontends without extra stuff. These things can also be downloaded from the mplayer site.