[MPlayer-users] Newbie? Playing DVD's on Mplayer

[D Richard Felker III]

On Mon, Mar 21, 2005 at 01:09:18AM +0000, nigel henry wrote:
> Hi folks. I'm trying to get Mplayer set up to play DVD's. It will play sound 
> files ok. .ogg, .wav, .mp3. But no matter what I try I can't get it to play 
> my DVD's. DVD ROM drive is Asus DVD-ROM DVD-E616P 0104 CDU5211. Video Card: 
> Rage 128 RL/VR AGP.  Sound Card: Ensoniq ES1371 [Audio PCI-97] Driver ES1371. 
> There is no problem with the DVD ROM drive it plays fine on the same machine 
> using Win ME and the Asus software. This is on FC1, Kernel 
> 2.4.22-1.2199.nptl. Sound: OSS. I've set the video options to use VIDIX 
> driver which the manual says is for the Rage 128 card, but am very confused 
> about codecs. This is for playing PAL DVD's. The file name for the DVD I 
> tried is .VOB, but when I click on any of the files on the DVD the Mplayer 
> screen turns black and then reverts to the Mplayer screen. Like Zilch. Any 
> help to not have to use Win ME to play DVD's would be very gratefully 
> appreciated. Nigel.

Read the documentation. You can't just play .vob files from the dvd.
You have to use a command line of the form mplayer dvd://titlenumber
where titlenumber is replaced by whatever title on the dvd you want to
play. Usually it's 1 (or sometimes 2 or 3) for movie dvds, but
sometimes you have to experiment until you find the right one, or look
for a program that will dump the names and lengths of all titles on
the dvd for you.

Rich