Dear All,
Last week, I bought myself a new DVD drive, an Asus E608,
which is a RPC1 drive. Being a new technology for me, I only
have two DVDs to play with it ("G3: Live in Concert" and Elvis
Presley's comeback special).
Of course, the first thing I did was to just compile a new
2.4.7 (at the time) kernel with the new ioctl interface for
DVDs for a sid install that I have.
I started searching the Debian repositories for DVD players
and I've found two players that seemed to do the job (reading
their descriptions on their respective sites): xine and
videolan (vlc).
I installed everything and started watching the DVDs, but then
I got two little surprises:
1 - the DVD playback didn't include subtitles (I later tested
this on another movie that I rented at a local
Blockbuster), which are very important for me, since
English is not my first language and I can't understand it
very well (I can not even write correctly in English, much
less listen to people speaking it).
2 - the DVD playback shows a lot of artifacts, especially
during fast-moving scenes, with the two players showing
the same problems.
The effect that I saw was that output of the DVD players
had an interlaced display: I saw the even lines not
aligned with the odd lines, which was a bit distracting.
Unfortunately, using PowerDVD 2.x under Windows/98, everything
run fine and the problems above didn't appear. So, I guess
that the hardware is working fine.
Reading through some sites, I discovered that Linux players
have problems displaying subtitles in overlay mode (which I
don't even know what means) and tried to run vlc without it,
by invoking vlc (0.2.82) with the vlc_overlay option disabled
(set to 0), but as soon as I opened the DVD (using the gnome
plugin), it crashed with a segmentation fault. :-(
Is this a known problem?
Also, I have a question regarding zones: will I be able to
watch DVDs without ever worrying about zones? Is it handled
transparently by the drive (which ignores the zones -- or so
I've been told)? Do xine or vlc take care of that or should I
use a program to set the "current" region of the drive?
I'm a little bit lost here with regards of DVDs and I'd
appreciate any help.
Thank you very much in advance, Roger...
P.S.: I'm using the latest versions of all programs from today's
update of sid.
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Rogério Brito - [EMAIL PROTECTED] - http://www.ime.usp.br/~rbrito/
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