[PLUG] wmv on linux

[Jeme A Brelin]

On Thu, 16 Jun 2005, John Jordan wrote:
> On 16 Jun 2005, at 13:22, AthlonRob wrote:
>> Aaron Baer wrote:
>>> I've always found ogle to be the most consistent application for 
>>> playing DVD's.
>>
>> Ditto.
>>
>> MPlayer for files, ogle for DVDs!  :-)
>
> Sell, so far I have tried Totem (installed by default on my Ubuntu 5.04 
> AMD-64), MPlayer, Ogle and VideoLan Client. None work.

We'll take a look at what works and in what ways.

> Totem pops up when I insert a movie DVD, and then announces it can't 
> play the DVD because of an "unspecified error."

OK, no idea.  Never used Totem.  Don't know anything about it.

> MPlayer starts to play the DVD, a screen flashes up for about one 
> second, and then the whole program disappears.

MPlayer doesn't do any DVD menu navigation, so what you're getting is the 
first track on the first title of the DVD, which is likely just the "FBI 
Warning" garbage.  It's far less than a second long and your machine is 
told to loop it some number of times when you're playing a video.

Try running MPlayer from the command line and throwing in a few different 
combinations
mplayer dvd://1
mplayer dvd://2

Just see what happens.

> Ogle and VLC do the same, except they don't even flash a screen up for a 
> second. They just go away.

OK, so what exactly are you doing with ogle?  For me, I run ogle and it 
gives me the little floating toolbar and I choose "open disc" from the 
menu.  As soon as that happens, I get the DVD menu (sometimes with an "FBI 
Warning" beforehand).  Are you choosing "Open disc" and getting some other 
behavior?  Can you describe it in any detail?

> I'm pretty sure lbdvdread3 is installed. Also the other one, *css or 
> something.

Well, Debian, being based in the USA, doesn't distribute all of the decss 
code with their system, but it's available from other sources if you are 
one of those people who can run it legally.  You have to run some commands 
by hand in order to make it work properly.  A list of those commands (in a 
format that you or your machine can understand) is part of the libdvdread3 
package and is here:

/usr/share/doc/libdvdread3/examples/install-css.sh

So, you know, if you are able to run that thing, you can make sure you 
have up-to-date dvdcss libraries.

> I can browse the files on the DVD, so reading the media is not the 
> problem. All I can think of is that it's some security issue.

Cartel security, yes.  The discs are designed to work only with players 
that are manufactured by licensees.  It's just a little scheme for picking 
up money on both ends of the transaction and keeping competition at a 
minimum.  It's all a very natural part of industrial capitalism.  Hell, 
it's practically the reason we have government.

J.
-- 
    -----------------
      Jeme A Brelin
     jeme at brelin.net
    -----------------
  [cc] counter-copyright
  http://www.openlaw.org