If so, are their only certain models, and where is a list i can look at. I was thinking of picking up a cheap Creative Labs model. Also, are their any DVD movie players for linux? Thanks in advance. I cant seem to find a single DVD drive on Red Hat or Mandrake's compatibility list.

linux will support any atapi device, pretty much.

you can use data disks.... getting any dvd movies to play however, is beyond the scope of this forum post.

hehe. DeCSS is required to play dvd movies and it's a bitch to get to work right.

quote:Originally posted by mrstryfe:
linux will support any atapi device, pretty much.

you can use data disks.... getting any dvd movies to play however, is beyond the scope of this forum post.

hehe. DeCSS is required to play dvd movies and it's a bitch to get to work right.

DOh! Oh well, guess i'll have to watch my DVDs with special additions---namely, numerous BSODs. Grrr. Thanks anyways.

http://linuxvideo.org http://xine.sourceforge.net http://192.190.173.45/homepage/news.html http://kdvd.sourceforge.net http://www.dtek.chalmers.se/~dvd/ http://www.opendvd.org

I have tried all of the above software dvd players under RedHat 7.0/7.1, Mandrake 7/8, Slackware, and Caldera OpenLinux 3.1 beta and all played DVD's. I will tell you this, Mandrake (any version) had no skipping. I am not sure if its the packages included with Mandrak distro's or the compiler that is distributed, but they run smooth. You have to have kernel 2.2.15 or later to read the UDF file system. I suggest a later 2.4 kernel to ensure max compatability. Opendvd and XINE are the most compatible and have the best playback. Ogle has the ability to read menu's, which is pretty cool.

Enjoy,
Jim

quote:Originally posted by jimmt:
http://linuxvideo.org http://xine.sourceforge.net http://192.190.173.45/homepage/news.html http://kdvd.sourceforge.net http://www.dtek.chalmers.se/~dvd/ http://www.opendvd.org

I have tried all of the above software dvd players under RedHat 7.0/7.1, Mandrake 7/8, Slackware, and Caldera OpenLinux 3.1 beta and all played DVD's. I will tell you this, Mandrake (any version) had no skipping. I am not sure if its the packages included with Mandrak distro's or the compiler that is distributed, but they run smooth. You have to have kernel 2.2.15 or later to read the UDF file system. I suggest a later 2.4 kernel to ensure max compatability. Opendvd and XINE are the most compatible and have the best playback. Ogle has the ability to read menu's, which is pretty cool.

Enjoy,
Jim

Thanks for the info, i'll look into them. Doany play full screen or at least close to full screen?

Xine looks to be comming alone nicely. Lin2000 will be out soon (commercail ware fromthe win2000 folks) - they may bundle the linux port in some DVD drives next year.

DeCSS has nothing to do with DVD movie playback - it is only an encription breaker so one can copy DVDs. Thats all - it was a crack written by a Norwegan(sp) 15-YO kid from is bedroom. He was arrested 6-months later (Dec-99?). But put his code onto the "net" - posting the code is illegal, but some sites post links (which are often shut-down within a few days/weeks)). Decss GUI "Frontends" are perfectly legal and many are available.

quote:Originally posted by gaffo:

DeCSS has nothing to do with DVD movie playback

DeCSS is essential for movie playback.

quote:
Xine looks to be comming alone nicely.

Indeed it is, but if you dont download the separate DeCSS module, you wont be able to watch any movies with it.

quote:

it is only an encription breaker so one can copy DVDs

You don't need to break the encryption to copy a DVD. Pirate DVDs were available before DeCSS came out. You don't work for the RIAA do you? You seem to have fallen for their propaganda.

quote:
posting the code is illegal

only in countries where the corporations have bought the laws. It's not illegal in Norway for instance, where the author was arrested. In fact, he was soon released, and apparently given a meddle by his government when they realized what was going on.

You guys need to check out the MPLAYER program for Linux.. this actually avoids using the "illegal" (whatever) DeCSS code, but using/borrowing the "LEGAL" Microsoft DLL's...from your legally installed Microsoft operating system in another partition.

quote:MPlayer is a movie player for LINUX. It plays most MPEG, AVI and ASF files, supported by many native and win32 DLL codecs. You can watch VCD, DVD and even DivX movies too. The another big feature of mplayer is the wide range of supported output drivers. It works with X11, Xv, DGA, OpenGL, SVGAlib, fbdev, but you can use SDL (and this way all drivers of SDL) and some lowlevel card-specific drivers (for Matrox/3dfx/SiS) too! Most of them supports software or hardware scaling, so you can enjoy movies in fullscreen. And what about the nice big antialiased shaded subtitles (7 supported types!!!) with hungarian, english, cyrillic, czech, korean fonts, and OSD?

Here is the homepage: http://mplayer.dev.hu/homepage/about.html

The obligatory screenshot with a little Gladiator DIVX running:

Thats cool....do you know offhand whether it has specific drivers for Nvidia cards? I know own a Radeon DDR, a Voodoo 5500 and a Geforce 2 Pro (will the spending madness never end), though so i guess i could always use the Voodoo if it performs better for fullscreen mode.

quote:Originally posted by blppt:
Thats cool....do you know offhand whether it has specific drivers for Nvidia cards? I know own a Radeon DDR, a Voodoo 5500 and a Geforce 2 Pro (will the spending madness never end), though so i guess i could always use the Voodoo if it performs better for fullscreen mode.

Don't think you need a specific driver for nVidia cards. I have a GTS running in RH 7.1 with 0.9x drivers. I ran the Mplayer smoothly from the getgo. Xine with DeCSS was a bi**h to setup, and still haven't gotten it to work.

quote:Originally posted by Tensai:
Don't think you need a specific driver for nVidia cards

Yeah...it just uses the normal XFREE86 built-in acceleration for your video card.

quote:Originally posted by The_Hitman:

Yeah...it just uses the normal XFREE86 built-in acceleration for your video card.

Yeah...but wouldnt the player run smoother on a device that has a specific driver, rather than just using the Xfree acceleration architecture?

quote:Originally posted by blppt:
Yeah...but wouldnt the player run smoother on a device that has a specific driver, rather than just using the Xfree acceleration architecture?

In Linux, unlike Winodws...generally you dont have to go all over the web hunting for "specific" drivers for every device to install... all the appropriate code is in the regular XFREE... just like all the "drivers" are all in the Kernel for everything else... you dont really "install" drivers in Linux...

If the hardware is supported in Linux the appropite drivers are already there... you just have to sometimes configure the drivers.. like tell the code what IRQ your TVCARD is on etc...

The way you usually get new hardware support in Linux is when you uprade....so that would be upgrading to a new kernel version, or upgrading to a new version of XFREE86...thats what the NVIDIA support basically is.. you have to load THEIR VERSION of XFREE86 that they have built new support for their cards into.

quote:Originally posted by The_Hitman:

In Linux, unlike Winodws...generally you dont have to go all over the web hunting for "specific" drivers for every device to install... all the appropriate code is in the regular XFREE... just like all the "drivers" are all in the Kernel for everything else... you dont really "install" drivers in Linux...

If the hardware is supported in Linux the appropite drivers are already there... you just have to sometimes configure the drivers.. like tell the code what IRQ your TVCARD is on etc...

The way you usually get new hardware support in Linux is when you uprade....so that would be upgrading to a new kernel version, or upgrading to a new version of XFREE86...thats what the NVIDIA support basically is.. you have to load THEIR VERSION of XFREE86 that they have built new support for their cards into.

That doesnt sound right, though. There are actual drivers for nvidia cards on their site, and i'm pretty sure Xfree isnt replaced when you install those drivers. Upgrading to a new version of Xfree will get you their "nv" generic Xfree driver, but the "nvidia" drivers replace those.

quote:Originally posted by blppt:
That doesnt sound right, though. There are actual drivers for nvidia cards on their site, and i'm pretty sure Xfree isnt replaced when you install those drivers. Upgrading to a new version of Xfree will get you their "nv" generic Xfree driver, but the "nvidia" drivers replace those.

What NVIDIA is doing (and this is why I dont like them)... is they are PROVIDING THEIR OWN CUSTOM version of X....that way they dont have to give any of their apparnetly top-secret, ultra-secure, more-valuable-than-the-launch-codes driver code to the XFREE86 team...

In affect, if you have an NVIDIA card you have to your their PROPETARY X-Server software since they will not support open source code for their cards.

They are a special, and dangerous case of vendor...

No wonder someone complains that NVIDIA drivers dont work well on systems with more than 1 CPU... how do we know they even coded properly for that configuration?? and since we dont have the source code we can "recompile" for proper multi-cpu use...

Thats the problem with closed source hardware support, you only get what they want you to have, and it will only work with what they tested it with at their site.

Maybe they will see the light eventually....ATI Finally came around and started working with the opensource community...

It seems to make sense to me... hell.. if they would give the information that the XFREE86 guys need, then they would write the drivers for NVIDIA, and NVIDIA wouldnt have to spend any time, or effort trying to write their own for Linux.

If you are interested in the DeCSS code, you might like to know that after some work it has been condensed down to about 6 lines! I won't post it here, because I don't want to get anyone in trouble, but I know that it was PRINTED in an issued of the MIT Technology Review magazine a month or two ago.....

People are using it for sigs, and it is even floating around on T-shirts. This is sort of a "All your base are belong to us" for the videophile/linux hackers (not cracker)

also check out this link:

Explaining DeCSS to the Movie Industry

I went back and found that article I was talking about: here it is

DeCss Article

So DeCSS is written in Perl? Oh, and...screw the MPAA and anyone else who has been filing lawsuits against programmers and businesses. geez, you think they wouldn't notice a 3 or 4 million dollar drop in revenue with all that damned money they make. I say almost anything digital should be open source. jeez. anyways. laters.

quote:Originally posted by The_Hitman:

What NVIDIA is doing (and this is why I dont like them)... is they are PROVIDING THEIR OWN CUSTOM version of X....that way they dont have to give any of their apparnetly top-secret, ultra-secure, more-valuable-than-the-launch-codes driver code to the XFREE86 team...

Well, maybe the drivers if open sourced would reveal Nvidia technology to competitors, so personally i dont blame them for refusing to opensource their drivers. Thats just me though, but i'm not the biggest "open source everything" person on the planet.

quote:Originally posted by blppt:
Well, maybe the drivers if open sourced would reveal Nvidia technology to competitors, so personally i dont blame them for refusing to opensource their drivers. Thats just me though, but i'm not the biggest "open source everything" person on the planet.

Well.. ATI apparently decided that the benifits outweigh the "RISKS"... they went from being the best supported card in Liunx to trying to close everything up for a while, and now they are one of the biggest supporters of Linux and work very hard with the XFREE86 team to further video support in Linux and provide great OpenGL.

Linux people are now starting to say "Buy ATI, they are a great company with great products...buy a RADEON they are great.."... dont buy NVIDIA they suck...

Linux people are very involved in the 'technical' community and I think NVIDIA needs to start to wake up or their reputation is gonna be hurt...

Of course, my own thery is that NVIDIA have so much market share right now, they are arrogant and becoming like the Microsoft of Video Cards.

quote:Originally posted by The_Hitman:

Well.. ATI apparently decided that the benifits outweigh the "RISKS"... they went from being the best supported card in Liunx to trying to close everything up for a while, and now they are one of the biggest supporters of Linux and work very hard with the XFREE86 team to further video support in Linux and provide great OpenGL.

Linux people are now starting to say "Buy ATI, they are a great company with great products...buy a RADEON they are great.."... dont buy NVIDIA they suck...

Linux people are very involved in the 'technical' community and I think NVIDIA needs to start to wake up or their reputation is gonna be hurt...

Of course, my own thery is that NVIDIA have so much market share right now, they are arrogant and becoming like the Microsoft of Video Cards.

But really, what is wrong with nvidia drivers? They deliver almost 100% of windows performance while the "open-source" ATI drivers deliver somewhere in the neighborhood of 50-70% of windows performance. They may never get near windows performance simply because the people working on the code for the ATI cards may not have the "engineering insiderness" that an actual ATI employee/designer has. If nvidia stops supporting linux, then people can complain. But what is so wrong about having the best performing linux drivers and no being open source? And if what you say is true about the linux zealots bashing nvidia, thats just really dumb. Hell, if they make enough trouble for nvidia we may see NO linux support. Its not like Nvidia depends on linux 3d gaming for capital. Sometimes i question the intelligence of those people. I mean, so what that we dont all get to see the innards of nvidia driver/video card technology. Is it really that important?

quote:Originally posted by blppt:
But really, what is wrong with nvidia drivers? They deliver almost 100% of windows performance while the "open-source" ATI drivers deliver somewhere in the neighborhood of 50-70% of windows performance. They may never get near windows performance simply because the people working on the code for the ATI cards may not have the "engineering insiderness" that an actual ATI employee/designer has. If nvidia stops supporting linux, then people can complain. But what is so wrong about having the best performing linux drivers and no being open source? And if what you say is true about the linux zealots bashing nvidia, thats just really dumb. Hell, if they make enough trouble for nvidia we may see NO linux support. Its not like Nvidia depends on linux 3d gaming for capital. Sometimes i question the intelligence of those people. I mean, so what that we dont all get to see the innards of nvidia driver/video card technology. Is it really that important?

It can be...

Take 3dfx for example... for a long time they were like Nvidia... forcing you to use BINARY only drivers...

Well guess what... their software didnt work if you had more than one processor in your system... and there was NOTHING you could do to fix it because you were totally dependant on them to compile it how they wanted...

And when a new version of say OpenGL comes out... guess what...you cant install that because their binaries only work with the old version....

etc

etc

etc

And the ATI Radeon drivers are not even like 2 months old... give them a few months to catch up before we make performance judgements.

The other problem with closed drivers is that NVidia can release them for Linux, but what happens when someone who use some other free Unix. They are pretty much useless to them.

You can forget about using NVidia drivers if you run (say) FreeBSD