[Mplayer-users] playing back VOB files

[Gábor Lénárt]

On Tue, Sep 25, 2001 at 10:19:58PM +0100, Liyang Hu wrote:
> For some stupid reason ... (I've got an under-powered desktop
> [Celery 300A], but it has a DVD drive. I've also got a 100Mbps
> ethernet running between that and my laptop, which also has TV
> out. So I thought, why don't I use my laptop to decode the DVDs?
> Anyway ...)
> 
> ... I'd like to be able to play back encrypted VOB files -- I can
> handle the drive authentication manually.
> 
> Looking through the documentation and source, I don't think this
> is possible at the moment. Any chance of such a feature creeping
> into the CVS tree any time soon? ^_^

Hmmm. It's an interesting question.

With old-style DVD support in mplayer (which could only play a VOB file
and doing descrambling) it's quite easy. Just run mplayer on the machine
equipped  with the DVD drive, then memorize the title key mplayer printed
out. Then export the content of DVD disk through the network (with eg NFS),
and now you can mount it on the remote machine. Then you must start mplayer
with '-dvdkey' and the number you've memorized. However there can be
some problem, like:

* AFAIK title key is valid for a TITLE, but I don't know too much about
  DVD structures. The old-style DVD support in mplayer is hacked in by me,
  and I simply assumed that title key is for a VOB file (of course it's
  possible to have the same key for multiple number of VOB files, but
  I only assumed that title key is the same WITHIN one VOB file).

* You must be carefull to run mplayer on DVD equipped machine first because
  otherwise the drive can't even read data blocks (locked sectors) from
  the disk which will cause tons of errors inside - for example - kernel
  NFS daemon. It certanly cause problems I think :) Anyway if you have got
  problems, you should use some user level networked filesystem server.

* I've never tried this but in theory it should work (well, at least to my
  mind :)

The newly introduced DVD support (libdvdread integration by A'rpi) is
a totally different case. I think it's almost hopeless to try to implement
such a configuration through the network you described.

However there is something called 'network block device' (nbd) which can export
block device through the network. However I don't know it can pass special
ioctl's as well which are issued by libdvdread. Maybe mplayer should have
some special DVD server daemon :) and support inside mplayer to access such
an server through the network. Though it's a wild idea ...

- Gabor

-- 
 --[ Gábor Lénárt ]---[ Vivendi Telecom Hungary ]---------[ lgb at lgb.hu ]--
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