DVD Playback, XINE, sound, ALSA?

[chris4amd]

I have a few questions that accompany a few problems (I will apologize now for all the newbie stuff--sorry).

1. I have read about ALSA, but not much about it in the way of why and when to use it. I don't have ALSA installed right now or configured, but I do have sound working in gnome. I can play avi or other movie files just fine. Do I need ALSA?

2. I have a DVD-ROM drive and would like to watch DVDs. I have installed Ogle and Totem, and can see video from my drive with little problem, however, I don't hear any sound. I don't know if this is related to not having ALSA, or the fact that my DVD-ROM only shows up as a CD-ROM (Is this right?). What should I do to get sound?

3. How do I watch DVDs in XINE? This might be related to my DVD-ROM only being recognized as a DVD-ROM, but XINE works great for everything else, and I can't get it to play DVDs.

But let it be said that I am generally VERY PLEASED with Gentoo, these only seem to be minor annoyances.

[KiTaSuMbA]

a few answers:
1. No, you don't need ALSA since your soundcard is OSS-supported and you only want it for playback.
(you can find some more extensive discussion on the ALSA vs. OSS issue here: https://forums.gentoo.org/viewtopic.php?t=19003 )

2. That's rather strange... Are you sure that a sound deamon is not blocking your DVD players (ogle or whatever)? Run it from a terminal and report the error if any.

3. I don't use xine (I'm an mplayer user) but it could be that xine defaults to /dev/dvd while you have another device assigned as your dvd drive. If that is the case you have two solutions: a) change the xine configuration to look for the actual device instead of /dev/dvd b) create a symbolic link from the actual device to /dev/dvd (notice that if you use devfs, you'll have to use its configuration file to achieve that rather than simply using "ln -s"). I'm confident that the exact ways of doing so are already posted somewhere here in these forums, so give the "search" a spin.

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[chris4amd]

With your help I have corrected most things. But I still have two issues plaguing me. First, in every player I try, I get lines around motion, like the linear filtering is weird or working badly or something.

Second, I still can't get Xine to work for playing DVDs. It refuses, but I do have all the necessary libraries for that installed. It just says that it can't play the VOB file. But it works for everything else.

[KiTaSuMbA]

I'm glad I've been at least partially useful.
For the rendering the horrizontal lines: I think this might have to do with your HW... When I was running X at 1600x1200 dvd playback could get pretty awful in fullscreen... back to 1280x1024 I have no issues at all. I think I was just pushing a comodity Riva far too much, the rest of the box being quite high on specs.

The xine issue: since I have no useful experience with this particular player I really can't say I know what's wrong...
Anybody wants to take on this?
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[pilla]

For xine, have you emerged and selected dvdnav when playing the dvds?

[chris4amd]

I have installed DVDNav and all other DVD related packages.

I scaled back my resolution to 1152x864, but still to no avail. I am on a rather poor monitor, but I could play DVDs without this problem under windows at the same resolution. Is it perhaps that there is a refresh rate problem? I know that my monitor can refresh at 75 hz at this resolution, but is there a way to set the refresh rate manually to fix DVD playback with XINE?

I have a 17" Mag Innovision monitor and a GeForce4 Ti 4600 with the Nvidia kernel and GLX drivers installed.

[guidodev]

This may not be your problem, but when I first used xine I was confused by the DVD option (plugin) you can click on. DON'T DO IT, unless you have a *non-encrypted* dvd. Otherwise, click *only* on the NAV option, and everything should be fine. Confused the heck out of me at first... I believe they have fixed this non-intuitiveness in the newest version of xine that uses the alpha version of xine-lib by incorporating the dvdnav plugin into the main xine-lib source tree, so that clicking DVD now works for any DVD.

[chris4amd]

This isn't my problem, but it does clear up a personal mystery of why I had to click NAV to watch a DVD instead of clicking DVD. Thanks!