Hi,

Been messin' with my pegasosII, and trying to get it to be able to watch DVD's on it as its mentioned in a few docs/sites here and there.

Problem is that whenever I try to open a DVD file (.vob)I get an error on screen saying there is a read error on the disk? Happens with all the DVD's I tried. I also tried a home made video cd with the same problems...

....I'm using a nec dvd r/w drive, which I "borrowed" out of one of my pc's - and it read disks etc fine when in the pc.

If I have a data dvd in there, or a data cd I can read off all the files with no problems? Seems to be a dvd video thing....

..or is the current cd rom/file system handler just not that good at handling media errors yet?

Regards,

- Ian.

You need Mplayer or Frogger to watch DVD's.

I'm using MPlayer 0.91 already. I'll try Frogger as well, but the problem seems to be whenever the file is read - it just pops up a requester saying "Volume <dvd name here> has a read/write error".

This happens when I try copying the files off too, not only when something (like mplayer) tries to read them. :(

MorphOS does not offer a filesystem which supports drive authentication or CSS decryption. Without support for that, those errors are "normal" because you are not allowed to access the content before access is granted via authentication.

Try this:
mplayer -dvd-device ide.device:2 -dvd 1

(replace 2 with whatever unit number your dvd drive is)

Still, mplayer 0.91's DVD playback doesn't work with every DVD drive...

Yes, mplayer 0.9 has problems with playing encrypted (!) DVDs with some drives (e.g. my LG 4120B), unencrypted ones work fine though.
But there's also mplayer 1.0pre4, that uses an updated version of libdvd library. This one can also play encrypted files on my drive.
But one must be careful, as mplayer 1.0 has a different syntax for command line arguments than previos versions !

It's a pity that there is no updated compile of mencoder using the newer libdvd version, so that I could encode also encrypted discs with my drive :(

You cannot directly access VOBs on an encrypted DVD without first unlocking the drive (done by f.ex. launching MPlayer like described in this thread), but even when unlocked the VOBs are still encrypted and unplayable without decrypting them first (using special tools for this purpose), so the only way to play such a DVD (or really any DVD, if you want proper playback) is by using an appropriate player (like MPlayer) in the appropriate fashion (direct drive-access, not file-level!).

As for VideoCDs, they shouldn't mount at all, as they have the actual video data on a special custom track, and mostly uninteresting things on the data track (with a fake link to the video)...


- CISC

When I try running mplayer with those command line options, it just makes a requester pop up saying "please insert volume ide.device in any drive", and looking at the command line output, its trying to play the file "DVD title - device"?

Been looking through the documentation and there isn't any mention of these commands - I take it they are "hidden", or at least not documented yet?

When you say first unlocking the drive, are you referring to a system/file lock, or a region lock? Drive has been unlocked and is region 0... :o) Guess its probably device/system lock so the program can access the drive at low level...?

Still not having much luck with the command line options. Its not accepting the the "device" parameter - its trying to open it as a file? Defaulting to ide.device 1 - does it start from 0 or 1 - i.e. 0 is primary channel master, 1 is slave, 2 is Secondary channel master (which my drive is connected to ;o) )....

Scratch that - its just started working.... I must have just typed in something silly in... :o)

DVD title just "crashed" though - sound started looping although video was still playing ok...although it was a little slow?



[ Edited by Fizzy on 2006/1/8 18:27 ]

Well, it appears to be working, although video playback isn't full speed, but audio is fine?

Program starts reporting that video buffers are full/excessive, and I guess it starts trying to resynch everything thats why sound starts looping...

I've tried setting screen to a low res screen, 16 bit - same effect. :( In fact it seems to make very little difference what mode I'm in.

Been checking cpu usage and according to the task manager, it doesn't go above 75% usage when playing a dvd.. so theres a far bit of processing power left...

I'm using a radeon 9100@250/250 - could this be the problem? I've tried using the "-fs" option to get full screen as well, but unsure of whether that opens up a dedicated screen, or simply a full screen overlay?

Anybody else having such problems?

For reference I'm using a PegII, G4 at 1ghz, and 512mb ram. Nec 3250 dvd drive (I think ;o) ).

Quote:

It doesn't really have anything to do with the region .. all encrypted DVDs must be authenticated via a key exchange before you are allowed to access anything but the first few blocks of it (hence the read/write errors).

Quote:

This is just MPlayer sucking, usually adding -framedrop will improve, if not cure your problems...


- CISC

Thanks - found the "-framedrop" option earlier. ;)

Generally keeps in synch now but is dropping frames.

On a music video (around 3 mins) over 5010 frames it drops 583+. :(

Can frogger play DVD's directly? Probably try that if it can as surely a 1Ghz G4 should easily be able to decode a dvd in real time?

Tried frogger, and whenever I try opening files that mplayer opened ok
(avi files, mpeg2 etc) it just keeps on coming up with "unknown codec"
alerts on screen, or "cannot initialise video code mpgv.xp"?

Guess I'll have to stick to mplayer.. ;)

Quote:

Frogger is not capable of authenticating a drive nor decrypting the data, so no, you can't. ;)

And yes, an 1GHz G4 is more than sufficient to decode a DVD in realtime, however there are several limiting factors in MPlayer (atleast the currently available ones), one major one being that there's no caching with direct device access, which basically means that the DVD is read and decoded block-by-block, which slows it down alot .. another is the way the image is being transferred to the gfxcard is somewhat hopeless (completely unnecessary conversion, and slow copy (this may have been improved in some of the 1.0 versions in the wild, I don't know)) .. the former is hard to fix without either adding a specific feature to MPlayer, or rewriting this part of MPlayer itself significantly .. the latter is easily fixed, but doesn't work very well with voodoo-cards...


- CISC