which linux program plays .evo files (bluraydisc or hddvd)

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pieter_parker · Post by **pieter_parker** » Fri Feb 02, 2007 3:04 pm

anyone knows a linux player they can play .evo files from a bluraydisc or hddvd?

Gusar · Post by **Gusar** » Fri Feb 02, 2007 5:34 pm

Latest mplayer SVN can. But there are a few problems. First, no support for interlaced vc1 video. You have to patch the source to remove the check for interlaced, but I have no idea if all frames are displayed correctly when you do that or if they're simply skipped (I can't really say, because my processor is too weak to decode the video smoothly) - support for interlaced video is coming soon though. Second problem is a bit harder to overcome - there is no DD+/E-AC3 decoder yet, so you're without audio.

Oh, one more thing: Blu-Ray doesn't use .evo, it uses transport stream (with extension .m2ts).

macawgumbo · Post by **macawgumbo** » Fri Mar 23, 2007 5:53 pm

Any update on getting HD-DVD and BLU-RAY support on linux?

Gusar · Post by **Gusar** » Fri Mar 23, 2007 6:56 pm

macawgumbo wrote:Any update on getting HD-DVD and BLU-RAY support on linux?

Yes, a little. Latest mplayer in portage (mplayer-1.0_rc2_pre20070321-r2) fully supports all kinds of video in .evo (hd-dvd) and .m2ts (blu-ray) files. What's still missing is the DD+/E-AC3 decoder - however ffmpeg is again part of Google Summer of Code this year and it's possible that an E-AC3 decoder will be one of the things written (the VC-1 decoder was written in last year's SoC).

There's also a patch to add the UDF-2.5 filesystem to the linux kernel here, so theoretically it should be possible to decrypt hd-dvd and blu-ray discs in linux. I don't have a hd-dvd drive though, to test that theory.

wingrunr21 · Post by **wingrunr21** » Fri Mar 30, 2007 9:56 pm

I'd just like to point out that unless you have a video card that supports HDMI 1.3 or you directly output audio from your PC to your speakers, DD+/E-AC3 won't really matter. Only HDMI 1.3 has sufficient bandwidth for a DD+ data stream. S/PDIF doesn't have the bandwidth. All HD-DVDs have a traditional AC3 audio track. It is possible that mplayer could already support playing HD-DVDs. I also don't have a drive, so I don't know.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/E-AC-3
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HD-DVD#Audio

Gusar · Post by **Gusar** » Fri Mar 30, 2007 10:09 pm

wingrunr21 wrote:All HD-DVDs have a traditional AC3 audio track.

No, they don't. HD-DVDs have a real e-ac3 track that can't be decoded by an ac3 decoder.

Blu-Ray on the other hand, has a track which consists of an ac-3 core plus e-ac3 extensions. In this case, an ac3 decoder will simply ignore the extensions and play the core.

wingrunr21 · Post by **wingrunr21** » Sat Mar 31, 2007 12:14 am

If that is so then that means that every HD-DVD player is downmixing the E-AC3 stream to an AC3 audio stream since there are virtually no HDMI 1.3 devices available yet. That seems rather inefficient to me. How much more room would a regular AC3 track take up? Would people honestly know the difference? Probably not.

Gusar · Post by **Gusar** » Sat Mar 31, 2007 9:21 am

wingrunr21 wrote:If that is so then that means that every HD-DVD player is downmixing the E-AC3 stream to an AC3 audio stream since there are virtually no HDMI 1.3 devices available yet.

No. The player decodes the e-ac3 track in software and sends the decoded audio directly to the speakers via analog line-out, just like with any other audio format. Downmixing (or rather reencoding) only comes into play if you have an external hardware ac3 decoder and send it data over S/PDIF.

wingrunr21 wrote:How much more room would a regular AC3 track take up? Would people honestly know the difference? Probably not.

No person will ever notice the difference between regular ac3 and e-ac3, unless they have an expensive professional 7.1 audio setup. If anyone claims otherwise, then it's just placebo effect or a delusion.

Theophile · Post by **Theophile** » Thu Nov 15, 2007 7:03 pm

I wanted to give this a bump. Assuming my audio system only supports DTS and AC3 anyway, do the currently available players for HDDVD/BRD content in Linux support at least traditional 5.1 systems?

Gusar · Post by **Gusar** » Thu Nov 15, 2007 10:04 pm

To use your AC3 equipment with any audio that's not AC3 (E-AC3/AAC/WavPack/whatever), you have to do on-the-fly re-encoding. I'm not aware of any linux player being able to do so, but there's an alsa plugin. Emerge alsa-plugins with the ffmpeg USE flag to install it, then look here.

For E-AC3 you will also need to manually patch mplayer with the code from the ffmpeg SoC repository and add an entry into codecs.conf. Or maybe this patch will work (it's for 1.0-rc2 I think).

yngwin · Post by **yngwin** » Thu Nov 15, 2007 11:23 pm

The latest mplayer subversion ebuild in berkano overlay has the eac3 patch.