mplayer and libdvdnav...
 

Hi, first I just wanted to say thanks for all the help I get on this forum. I have a quick question about mplayer and libdvdnav: why can't I see DVD menus? I went to www.slackbuilds.org and installed the mplayer-codec, libdvdnav, and finally mplayer. I noticed that mplayer found the dvd navigation library successfully, but I still can't see any menus on my DVDs. I didn't explicitly install libdvdread, so I shouldn't have the conflict problem. Any ideas?

If you have libdvdnav installed, and not told mplayer to not use internal libdvdread, than you have support for both input streams. The default input-stream for dvds is dvd://, which is the old one without the menus. If you want to see the menus than you have to use the dvdnav:// input stream. But don't expect too much. DVD Navigation support in mplayer is in its early stages.

I don't have a dvdnav link, so I guess I am having the conflict problem. Looking at your response to the thread here...

http://www.linuxquestions.org/questi...ight=libdvdnav

you say to remove libdvdread anywhere mplayer installed it. Will that break anything else like xine? After I do that, do I need to rebuild the mplayer package?

If you want good DVD menu support, and don't want to use Xine, then I suggest you try VLC.

Eric

If you do not have installed a package called libdvdread, than you do not have to remove anything. If you have installed libdvdnav before you compiled mplayer and saw something like this during configure:

than your mplayer is configured to use libdvdnav. You can than see the menu with

but you won't be able to interact with it, ie click on it like in xine. You can (most likely) play the movie with

If this doesn't work there's something wrong. Post the error message here, probably someone can help you.

I compiled the svn mplayer with dvd navigation a while back but I suspect the method has not changed. The svn dvdnav is here:

and you will need to compile and install the source code. You will need to download and install libdvdread and libdvdcss and compile the svn mplayer with:

and perhaps add the following to ~/.mplayer/config:

This was all a little while ago though so be a little cautious with these directions :-)

Andrew

besides: are the dvd menues of any importance? you can play a dvd with dvd:// or you can even play a .vob file. so why bother with menues?

vadkutya

Thanks for all the responses. I'll try these out when I get home. The only reason I wanted DVD navigation is so I could view the extras. So mplayer doesn't really support DVD navigation but Xine and VLC player do? Maybe I'll try to get those working then.

Xine has excellent DVD menu support (haven't tried VLC) and allows you to either click on menu items (or scroll using PageUp and PageDown, etc. I think) or it also has a DVD remote window, which allows you to navigate through menus just as if it were a real DVD player -- so you won't miss out on any extras or easter eggs.

I agree Xine is quite nice, but unfortunately I also need mplayer/mencoder for devede 3.7 to work (it does a great job of authoring dvd's with menu support and subtitles). I don't usually like having redundant apps (i'm a clean freak with my system) but these two seem to play pretty well together. Why not just keep both?

you kann skip through the tracks by giving dvd:// a numer other than 1. try dvd://[2...]. if this doesn't work you still can play the different vob files so you won't miss any extras ;). all you miss is the fancy menu screen...

vadkutya