MPlayer experiment not working out well

[Roland Smith]

On Sun, Apr 12, 2009 at 05:04:52PM +0530, Manish Jain wrote:
> 
> The mplayer installation went pretty smoothly - no problems with that. 
> And the gui is more than acceptable - I don't need the gnome-mplayer 
> add-on. But the application has failed to play any file/CD/DVD for me so 
> far. The typical complaint for unencrypted vob files/iso-images is 'Too 
> many packets in the buffer', whereas for encrypted DVD's the application 
> produces garbage. (Please note it is willing to take dvd://1 on the 
> commandline but not dvdnav://1, even though libdvd[nav/read/css] are all 
> installed on my system). My DVD device in mplayer is /dev/dvd 
> (permissions 644), which is a symlink to /dev/acd0 (permissions 444).

I'm pretty sure that you need write access to the (real) DVD device as
well. A good way to do that would be to create a group named e.g. cdrom,
and add yourself to that group. Next you need to set the following in
/etc/devfs.conf: 

own     acd0     root:cdrom
perm    acd0     0660
link    acd0     cdrom
link    acd0     dvd
 
> For .dat files copies straight from CD's, the playback seems to occur at 
> the rate of one frame per annum. On more than a couple of occasions, I 
> remember getting some warning message to the effect 'gl missing : be 
> prepared for a severe performance penalty'.

What video output are you using? If supported by you graphics card
driver, use the xv video device (vo=xv in ~/.mplayer/config).
 
> Needless to say, my spirits are dampened after all the initial 
> enthusiasm and effort. Maybe somebody can point out what might be wrong 
> with my setup. Following is the output of my 'make showconfig' in 
> /usr/ports/multimedia/mplayer :
> > ===> The following configuration options are available for 

The config looks OK.

> In mplayer's Preferences/codecs, I am using the DirectShow codecs. Could 
> that be a problem. Any help would be greatly appreciated.

Are those the binary-only windows codecs? I've always run mplayer with
"none" in those preferences. Works fine here.

Roland
-- 
R.F.Smith                                   http://www.xs4all.nl/~rsmith/
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