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Newburyport GNUS

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DVD and video playback on Linux My latest adventure had involved getting video and dvd playback from Debian (Sarge) and Fedora Core 1. With Debian, getting xine installed was as easy as apt-get install xine-ui, because apt-get took care of the dependencies (namely xine lib). Once xine was installed, I found a neat site about xine in general, and found out that you can install various skins for the xine player user interface (the picture shows Celoma Gold). To download a new skin, you press Ctrl+d while window focus is on the Xine application. You should definately visit http://cambuca.ldhs.cetuc.puc-rio.br/xine/ for instructions on how to get xine, and how to get various codecs to support Windows and Mov file formats.

Of course, once xine was installed, I found out quickly that I could not access my CD-R drive, or my external DVD drive. I would get an error to the effect that "only root could mount dev/scd0 on mnt/dvdram". I was pretty sure that when I installed Debian on my system originally that I had chosen to allow normal users to mount devices (like floppy, cd-writer, dvd) -- mostly because this is my computer and I want to do what I want without having to invoke special super-user privileges. Also, this is what I'm accustomed to doing in a Windows environment. I think it is great that Linux allows you to precisely configure access to various resources, but for a desktop system, this feature can get in the way. So, I went hunting for the proper way to turn these devices on.

ls -al /mnt

showed that there was indeed a mount point defined called /mnt/dvdram. I tried to change the ownership of the mount point

 chown greg:greg /mnt/dvdram

but that didn't work

ls -al /dev/scd0

showed that the device was owned by root, and the group cdrom. I checked into the group to see if I was a member by using the graphical tool kuser (System -> User Manager). That showed I was a member of the cdrom group and the floppy group.

brw-rw-rw-    1 root     cdrom     11,   0 May 20 21:22 /dev/scd0

I read somewhere that I should do a 'modprobe ide-scsi' which didn't show any results. The next command I found was

cdrecord -scanbus

which did show that my DVD drive was there, and also my scanner. I made sure the device was indeed mounted on the /mnt/dvdram mountpoint

mount /dev/scd0 /mnt/dvdram

and, since Xine looks for DVDs at /dev/dvd by default, I created a symbolic link from /dev/dvd to the existing /dev/scd0

ln -s /dev/scd0 /dev/dvd

I also read that you need to have mtrr compiled into your kernel, which you can tell by this command

cat /proc/mtrr

According to this article, http://linux.omnipotent.net/article.php?article_id=11799, you need DMA (Direct Memory Addressing) enabled on the drive in order to avoid jumpy playback.

hdparm -d /dev/dvd

Told me I didn't have the hdparm tool, which I confirmed with a

locate hdparm

So, I installed hdparm

apt-get install hdparm

But now, when I run the same command, it tells me that this operation is not allowed on a SCSI drive. As far as I know, this is not a scsi drive, but an ide drive using scsi emulation...Then again, I just a user, and I'm feeling pretty lucky that I know it's a DVD drive. So, I'm not sure how to cure my jumpy playback issues. Anyway, at least I've got the permission problems licked, and Xine is installed with a nice UI, and I can playback a DVD from my external DVD drive.