I downloaded and compiled mplayer so that I could watch dvd movies, but I can't figure out how to play them! I am not sure what the commands is. For every other player (audio only, so far), /dev/cdrom is the right place but it doesn't work for mplayer.

I have a combo cd/dvd player, if that helps. Does anyone have any suggestions?

I am feeling kind of stupid and stumped right now. My distro is slack 10.0.

TIA!

lol.. its on the 7th line of the manual page "man mplayer"
did you compile mplayer with the Graphical user interface option ?

if so, use gmplayer, and select play dvd froom the menu, otherwise, follow the man page example..

Yes, I saw that, but I don't know what my particular options should be.

No, I just did this

./configure
make
make install

with no options. and I get a command line interface, which would be fine, if I knew
the specific requirements for each dvd, but I don't know what they are.

How do I find out what these are for my DVDs?

title
start_title
end_title

Thanks!

just try dvd://1 to start with... that's normally the money shot.

if you want to just plain see what's on a DVD, i maintain a c program to do just that. http://untrepid.com/acidrip/lsdvd.html

im always wiry to say thins incase you already know.. but ill recomend a differend dvd player.. Xine.

same capabilites than Mplayer, but much nicer GUI. (in my opinion)
and it has a "dvd" button

I'm also using slack10.
To play mplayer: mplayer dvd://1
to play gmplayer (which I prefer, better than xine for some things) :
gmplayer -vo xv -skin Blue dvd://1 depending on which skin you have installed in the /default dir.
To use gmplayer you must also have compiled mplayer with --enable-gui.
Use this README: http://www.mplayerhq.hu/DOCS/README

Missing from the readme,
It is necessary to make a symbolic link like so:
ln -sf /dev/cdrom /dev/dvd depending on what your dvd drive is named. This one is supposed to work for most.
And hdparm -d1 /dev/hdx is a good idea, where x is whatever drive, I've forgotten which I used.

Xine is an easier install, and works better for some things.

Ok, I made the symbolic link, and it started to play. I had to specify the ao driver for sound.

-ao alsa,oss,

worked.

But, not all disks will play.

One stopped suddenly:


Playing dvd://1.
Reading disc structure, please wait...
There are 61 titles on this DVD.
There are 1 chapters in this DVD title.
There are 1 angles in this DVD title.
DVD successfully opened.
MPEG-PS file format detected.

Too many video packets in the buffer: (4096 in 8284054 bytes).
Maybe you are playing a non-interleaved stream/file or the codec failed?
For AVI files, try to force non-interleaved mode with the -ni option.
MPEG: No audio stream found -> no sound.
VIDEO: MPEG2 720x480 (aspect 2) 29.970 fps 7800.0 kbps (975.0 kbyte/s)
vo: X11 running at 1280x1024 with depth 24 and 32 bpp (":0.0" => local display)
==========================================================================
Opening video decoder: [mpegpes] MPEG 1/2 Video passthrough
VDec: vo config request - 720 x 480 (preferred csp: Mpeg PES)
Could not find matching colorspace - retrying with -vf scale...
Opening video filter: [scale]
The selected video_out device is incompatible with this codec.
VDecoder init failed
Opening video decoder: [libmpeg2] MPEG 1/2 Video decoder libmpeg2-v0.4.0b
Selected video codec: [mpeg12] vfm:libmpeg2 (MPEG 1 or 2 (libmpeg2))
==========================================================================
Audio: no sound
Starting playback...
VDec: vo config request - 720 x 480 (preferred csp: Planar YV12)
VDec: using Planar YV12 as output csp (no 0)
Movie-Aspect is 1.33:1 - prescaling to correct movie aspect.
VO: [xv] 720x480 => 720x540 Planar YV12
New_Face failed. Maybe the font path is wrong.
Please supply the text font file (~/.mplayer/subfont.ttf).
subtitle font: load_sub_face failed.
V: 26.7 799/1599 19% 4% 0.0% 0 0

Exiting... (End of file)

It's a French movie with subtities.

Why don't you try both, Xine and mplayer. Maybe ogle also.
In xine you may need to download libdvdcss to play encrypted dvd ( i think in us this is illigal).
In greece Sunday newspapers offer dvd's. So I've got about 40 movies.
Some movies may play well with a program and not play with another.
In my case dogville played well with mplayer and refused to play with xine.
But in your case as far as i see it's a subtittle problem.

did you download a fonts package?
go to mplayers page http://www4.mplayerhq.hu/homepage/design7/dload.html
download a font, for english you need the first one ISO 8859-1, extract it, take one of the 4 sizes ( 14) without the folder(only the files inside) and place it in /usr/local/share/mplayer/fonts i think.

[edit]
You probably haven't noticed the codec packages also.
If you want to add codecs you have to compile it again. with the codecs package, mplayer will play wma,wmv,mov,avi,asf...almost everything.
Here is a guide of how to compile mplayer, it's for fedora but most of the stuff will work for slackware

http://www.mjmwired.net/resources/mplayer-fedora.shtml