DVD under Linux

[Lasse Saarinen]

Hello everybody!

I was extremely bored last night, so I decided once more to attempt to 
make some use of my
DVD-ROM drive under Linux. This time, I was positively surprised by what 
I found.

Looks like the software being developed by the people at LiViD 
(linuxvideo.org) has finally
reached a point where it's somewhat useable. I downloaded and compiled 
the latest CVS
snapshot of the tools last night, and I managed to get a couple of 
movies playing on my box.
The performance isn't great yet, and there are a lot of bugs, but I 
think this is signifficant
progress, since four months ago this same software wouldn't play a 
single clip.

I run a dual P3 800EB with 256M SDRAM. My videocard is a chunky old 8M 
ATI, and I use
XF86 3.3.6. The DVD drive I have is only 2X, so that might actually be 
the worst bottleneck.
On this setup, with all software deconding, I got on avarage about 22 
frames per second,
which doesn't come close to what th framerates could be, but is 
watchable. There was no
serious pixelation in the output, although some ripples did occasionally 
occur. Other than that,
the picture quality was decent. By the way, OMS, the player front-end 
module of the LiViD
project, does  not yet support full screen, so this is all acted out in 
a 800x600 window. The
sound also worked fine and was on sync with the picture. The software is 
supposed to support
some hardware decoders, so if you own one of those you might get better 
framerates. One
project hosted by LiViD is developing better support for the hardware on 
ATI boards. Looks
like there's something for even my old Rage Pro chipset. It needs XF86 
4.0.2 to work though.
Oh, and this particular project (called GATOS for General ATI TV and 
Overlay Software)
hails from SUNY Binghampton. =)

So, if you have a Linux box with a DVD drive and feel lucky, go to

http://www.linuxvideo.org/devel/dl.html
and get a tarball of the latest CVS snap shot, or just use CVS if you 
know what it is and does.
The project consists of ten different tools, each of whitch have to be 
compiled separeately and
are all still at alpha state, so don't be surprised if something doesn't 
compile at all. It happens.
To compile everything right, you'll need a whole bunch of development 
libraries which most
people probably won't have. I found everything I needed from 
rpmfind.net. Also, you don't
want to use this software if you have a particular love for Hollywood 
corporations and the
DVD consortium who are trying to keep DVD a closed standard. The LiViD 
tools use
DeCSS-like code quite balantly, and these people certainly have not 
licensed anything from
DVD-CCA, as is only proper. My hat of to them.

   - Lasse