Now that I have my dvd burner working well enough to do backups, I've
turned my eye towards goofing off, er, testing the audio/video
capabilities of netbsd.  I just got my first video dvd, "Terminator 3,
The Rise of the Machines" which seems strangely fitting.

After a bit of poking I noticed that the only large files on the dvd's
isofs were in a directory called "/video_ts/vts_NN_N.vob".  Feeding
these files to the various players worked to varying degrees.  This is
my experience unde -current:

mplayer / gmplayer - could play the various *.vob files.  The first
challenge was to figure out why the audio track was the director
talking about the movie.  It turns out the highly intuitive command
"-aid 128" was needed to select the english audio.  The "-aid 129"
command got one french and "-aid 130" got the director talking.  The
default was the director.  The only way to find the find the pool of
number to feed "-aid" was to run mplayer with "-v" and see what it
printed as the choices for this disk and then test them all by trial
and error (after sitting through 5 minutes of introduction).  The next
problem was that mplayer didn't knit the files together.  Every
billion bytes (a thousand million for you brits. ;-)) the player ran
out of bytes and needed to have the next file fed to it.  Summary:
mplayer is a good proof of concept, but it needs to understand the dvd
metadata better before it is a useful dvd player.
        
gxine - It understands the metadata and puts up a clickable table of
contents and allows some limited pausing / fullscreen etc.  The
fullscreen toggle only toggles to fullscreen mode.  Toggling back
doesn't work.  The screen stays fullscreen.  Pausing and sliding the
time-scale slider will eventually lock up the gui, but the underlying
play logic still runs.  The only thing to do is kill the gui and
restart.  The lock up is fairly easy to demonstrate.  Just drag time
slider backwards slowly.

There are various other runtime config bugs.  Selecting "ctl-S" to
save one's state causes an abort trap.

    snapshot: error - format H' unsupported
    Abort trap

I haven't been able to save my defaults from gxine without hitting the
abort.

ogle - three words: "Cannot allocate memory"

    *ctrl: get_buffer, shmget failed: Cannot allocate memory
    ERROR[ogle_mpeg_vs]: couldn't get buffer

So what are other folks using to play dvd's?

-wolfgang
-- 
Wolfgang S. Rupprecht 		     http://www.wsrcc.com/wolfgang/
       The above "From:" address is valid.  Don't mess with it.