For some reason with every single dvd playback program I've had the same problem of reallyt crappy resolution. The menus now work and the resolution is just as it should be in the menus, but the actual movies look really terrible. I've come as far as thinking that I need a proper codec, but I'm not sure.

Could anybody give any instructions as to how to look for a proper codec if I need one or is there anything else I should do.

Distro: Mandrake 10 with KDE
Program: Xine
DVD: liteon

Thanks.

I can't see why you would need any other codec. I think DVD's
are just mpegs.

The normal things to check are:

Is your DVD drive using DMA?
As root, hdparm -d /dev/dvd will tell you if it is.

Configure your player to use XV for video.
If you don't have that option in Xine, change the configuration to
Master of the Known Universe.

Hmm, XV refuses to work on my setup (i'm not the original poster)

Using a Sis 6326 - everytime I try to use XV with Xine all I get is a big blue box. the XV option seems to crash Mplayer, too.

Any ideas what could be causing it? I'm using Slackware 10.0 and KDE.

dma = on
driver = xv

The problem remains the same. This is really crucial for me to get to work, so help would be very much appreciated.

Sorry, Idon't know what your problem could be.
Aside from the crappy quality, is playback smooth?
Man 10 should be pretty set to go out of the box. (aside from css)
I suppose you could make sure you have mpeg2dec, but that's
pretty standard fare.

Again, sorry.

The first thing you would need to do is post your /etc/X11/xorg.conf,
But perhaps you should start a new thread so this one can stay on topic

My video card is ATI Radeon 8500. Could that be an issue?

The playback is smooth.

One thing you got to check is that it's an original DVD and not a copy.
Copied DVD or Homemade DVD usually don't have the same resolution of a original one. Have you tried the DVD on a windows box or on a normal DVD player. Or is this the same with all DVD's

DVD's are original and have worked fine with everything. It's the same with every dvd. What makes me wonder is that the menus look just like they should, so I guess that there's something wrong with the mpeg playback.

I"ve been trying it myself and i don't get any problems with Xine.
I've also have tried Mplayer and Totem and they also don't give me any problems.
So i've looked to what packages i have installed that have something to do with dvd playback and the only packages i have installed ander Xine-plugins Mplayer and libdvdread so those packages should be enough(at least for me they are on mandrake 10.0).

I notice now that it doesn't even read all dvd's. This is really sad and apparently there's nothing to do about this.

But I won't go back to Windows after this experience!

Thanks everyone for helping.

Do you have a recent "libdvdcss"

I've just found something interesting.
When trying to play DVD's with the default xine that was installed on my Suse box it gave me a message about DVD playback not being supported because of legal reasons. After some research i've found that there is no legal DVD player for linux that supports encrypted DVDs. You can use CSS based software but no distribution normally supports that in the standard versions of the media-players because it's illegal in the U.S. and Germany. So if you want to use Xine (and all xine based players ) to playback DVD's it's best to recompile it from source. or try find the MDK RPM packages that do support this. I'm not sure that that is what's causing all you problems but you could give it a shot.

Nope, that's not the problem.

Everyone in this thread will simply be using a DeCSS library It's just the way things are on Linux.

i had forgotten one thing that might help you.
Xine has a building system checking utility and this might give u an clue about what is going on.
run "xine-check".
There is one thing wrong with it. It will probably tell you that you are using a pre 2.2 kernel if you're using a 2.6 kernel but for the rest it will check a lot of things that can go wrong and give you some options on how you could fix those problems.