hi guys,

 

i have a problem with mplayer when trying to play dvds. the command mplayer dvd:// brings up the player, sound works fine but the picture is totally mangled.

 

the picture moves (and obviously does bare some relation to the actual dvd playing) but is a totally messed up version of what it's supposed to be. i haven't been able to capture it (as when i try, the screen doesn't show up in captures), but i have made this picture which looks pretty much exactly like the actual behaviour:

screenshot

 

the funny thing is, xine plays dvds perfectly, so it seems unlikely that i am missing some kind of codec or anything. also, i can play divx and other files with mplayer no problem. i've tried checking the parameters for mplayer, but there doesn't seem to be anything to fiddle with which might effect the picture this much.

 

anyone got any ideas?

 

cheers,

joe.

 

[edit]

might be useful to know, i'm using fedora 2 with the latest nvidia drivers, and a geforce 2 gts.

[/edit]

got it sorted

 

managed to sort it out after slogging through the behemoth man page for mplayer. changing the video driver fixed the messed up picture, command was:

mplayer -vo x11 dvd://


 

this made the screen a bit small though, so i did the following to scale the picture up to something a bit more suitable for tv-out:

mplayer -vo x11 -vop expand=800:600,scale=800:-2 dvd://


 

hope this will help someone else sometime :)

this isn't actually a perfect solution, since the x11 drivers do everything in software (hence very cpu intensive). this isn't really a problem if i'm just sitting there watching a dvd, since the xp1700+ inside can handle the work, but if i'm using the computer as well then it might not be adequate (i did actually notice a couple of minor stutters in my half hour dvd watch last night)

 

i've found some good info on the mplayer site though (here) which is specific to nvidia cards. looks promising, i'll give it a try when i get home.

is dma enabled for the dvdrom device?

yes, dma is on for all drives.

 

funny thing is, the xv driver works! i thought it was using this driver by default. obviously not, as using the following command works perfectly (and runs big enough to not need scaling):

 

mplayer -vo xv dvd://



 

haha, suppose the simplest solution is usually the correct one :)

 

(i've now edited /etc/mplayer/mplayer.conf to try xv first, instead of xvidix, so i can leave out the -vo option and it all works fine)