Hi there,

I was wondering how I can get XINE or mplayer to play DVDs. Xine refuses to play them at all, giving me the message:

Mplayer tries to play it, but the video and audio are scrambled. Twenty seconds into the video I get the error: "Too many video packets in the buffer: 4096 in 8282255 bytes"

How do I get DVDs to play? Does this have something to do with DeCSS?

Thanks,
Vince

Get Totem, because it plays DVDs regardless of copyrights I've heard (I have Totem but no DVD drive to try it out with). You can listen to wma and wmv files along with quicktime and many others as well, so it's worth more than that as well.

Am I correct that you use SuSE?
As we all know it is not allowed to copy DVDs. Distributions like SuSE do not put therefore the libraries for playing DVDs in their OS.
So I recommend downloading the mplayer source files an compiling it by yourself. Perhaps you get even a better performance by doing so.
http://www.mplayerhq.hu

The MPlayer is quite good but has a few problems with DVD-Menus. That's why I also installed Xine.

In my opinion these Players are the best one's in the moment.

Michael

Actually, I am using Mandrake 9.2.

I managed to get DVDs to work by downloading ogle 0.9.2 along with libdvdcss

"Get Totem, because it plays DVDs regardless of copyrights I've heard"

1. Totem is simply a front-end to Xine, so it won't neccessarily work. The problem stems from whether or not you're using DeCSS (which the libdvdcss basically is).
2. This technically has nothing to do with copyrights. It is already illegal to distribute copyrighted works without the expressed permission of the copyright holder. What you are violating when you play your own legal DVD copy on your Linux computer is the DMCA. This is because DeCSS has the possibility of being used to circumvent copyrights. Of course a CD burner, a hard drive, a VCR, paper, and a score of other existing technologies could do the same, which shows just how horribly ridiculous the DMCA is.

I'm using SUSE 9.0 and playing DVD's

What you have to do is uninstall the XINE stuff (not XINETD -- that's part of the system), then install XINE, LIBDVDNAV (might now be included in XINE) , and the CSS library to decrypt the DVD. These are available all over the net -- but uninstall the SUSE XINE first -- it won't work if you just try and install the XINE stuff over the SUSE distributed XINE.

Why Linux has a problem distributing DVD players I don't know -- Windows comes with Windvd or Powerdvd when you buy a DVD writer -- or even bundled with 'Doze to start with depending on what computer you buy.

(Same with the crappy region stuff --- when you can buy a DVD player in Tesco -- a UK supermarket -- for around 40 GBP / 65 USD it's not even worth paying to have a player "chipped" for multi-region any more -- a 2nd player is actually cheaper than sending one away to be modified)

It's Hollowood Paranoia and sheer Corporate Greed. If they sold these things at a proper price then piracy would more or less disappear and we wouldn't need to hunt all over the net for ways of LEGALLY PLAYING our DVD's that we've LEGALLY PURCHASED.

Yeah, I know that it's a front-end for Xine as I've been further around the block with Linux in three months than some people are in three years. I suppose that compiling Xine would be another option as well.