I got my DVD player working under Debian today. I want to thank the folks over at VideoLan.Org for all of the hard work they have put into the Video Lan package. I’ve got some screen shots for you to enjoy as well as how to set it up.
Screen Shots
I have 2 screen shots of “The Mummy Returns” playing on the desktop. Each show the DVD playing at different sizes.
Quick Setup
Note: I am using a Creative Labs 12X DVD drive
Install the videolan packages from the “unstable” tree.
apt-get install vlc
Next, go to Videolan.Org and download the libdvdcss package. Untar it, and run ./configure; make libdvdcss; make install (as root of course).
Playing DVD’s
If the setup went well type “vlc” at a command prompt. You should see the vlc player in screen shot 2 above. Click settings and setup the path to your DVD player. Since I have my DVD player setup using the ide-scsi kernel module, my dvd player is /dev/scd1. Make a link in /dev/ so that /dev/dvd links to /dev/”yourid”.
Once this is done, click on the Disc Icon in vlc and your DVD of choice should start to play. One thing I have noticed is the hard drive does seem to be getting a work out as well as the CPU while playing DVD’s. If you pull up screen shot 1, you will see the disk and cpu meters on the right side of the screen (the disk usually runs a little higher than that though).
Summary
Playing DVD’s under Linux is extremely cool. If you don’t have a DVD drive on your machine, then get one!