DVD Playback HOWTO
David
Jao
djao@dominia.org
2004-02-26
1.0
2004-02-26
DJ
Initial Release, reviewed by LDP
0.9
2004-02-07
DJ
submitted to LDP
0.1
2004-01-26
DJ
first public release
This document describes how to view DVD movies on a Linux computer
with a DVD drive.
Introduction
In this document we describe how to view DVD movies and video on a Linux
system. We give practical, specific, and straightforward commands for
getting DVD playback up and running quickly on most of the popular Linux
distributions. Special attention is given to the various little-known
performance optimizations that are needed for smooth DVD video playback.
Copyright and License
This document, DVD Playback HOWTO, is
copyrighted © 2004 by David Jao.
Permission is granted to copy, distribute and/or modify this
document under the terms of the GNU Free Documentation License,
Version 1.2 or any later version published by the Free Software
Foundation; with no Invariant Sections, with no Front-Cover Texts,
and with no Back-Cover Texts. A copy of the license is available
at
http://www.gnu.org/copyleft/fdl.html.
Linux® is a registered trademark of Linus Torvalds.
Disclaimer
No liability for the contents of this document can be accepted.
Use the concepts, examples and information at your own risk.
Although this is highly unlikely, there may be errors and
inaccuracies herein that could be damaging to your system. The
author(s) do not take any responsibility for any damage that you
incur through your own actions.
The mere act of accessing or viewing DVD content, or dealing
in software written for such purposes, may be illegal in some
localities. The author(s) cannot accept any responsibility for any
actions of yours which violate the laws of the jurisdictions to
which you are subject.
All copyrights are held by their by their respective owners,
unless specifically noted otherwise. Use of a term in this
document should not be regarded as affecting the validity of any
trademark or service mark. Naming of particular products or
brands should not be seen as endorsements.
Feedback
Questions, comments, suggestions, and feedback are most certainly
welcome and should be sent to the author of this document at
djao@dominia.org.
System Preparation
Hardware Prerequisites
A certain level of processing power is necessary for smooth DVD
playback. The system requirements in Linux are somewhat higher than in
Windows, because many of the techniques used for hardware acceleration
of video playback work only in Windows.
At a minimum, I recommend the following:
700 MHz or higher CPU,
video card with support
DVD drive with enabled
Creating the /dev/dvd symlink
If you don't already have a /dev/dvd symbolic
link, then run (as root) the
command# ln -s /dev/hdc /dev/dvd
to create a symbolic link from
/dev/dvd to the
actual hardware device representing your DVD-ROM drive
(which in this example is /dev/hdc, but you should
replace it with the actual device file used by your drive). The
/dev/dvd link is not merely a matter of
convenience; almost all of the player software mentioned in this HOWTO
assumes that the link is there.
If you don't know which device name your DVD-ROM drive uses, you
can usually find it with the command dmesg | grep
DVD in the console or a shell right after booting up the system.
Setting the DVD Region
All DVD drives (except for RPC Phase I drives made in
1999 or before) enforce region playback
restrictions in the drive firmware and consequently are supposed to
be set to a specific region before they can play back discs from that
region (and only that region). In reality, most Linux DVD playback
software can bypass the DVD drive's built-in region locks, but it takes
extra time for the software to break the region lock, and it is better
to avoid the complications of region locks if you can.
For the small minority of readers who own RPC-I drives, you do not need
to do anything: your drive is already capable of handling DVDs from all
geographical regions. These drives are old enough by now that everybody
who has one of them probably knows already that they have one.
For the majority of readers who have RPC-II drives, there are several
options available:
If you only watch discs from one region, the easiest option
is to use the regionset program to
set your DVD drive to the correct region.
If you want to watch discs from multiple regions, you can
try to find a firmware upgrade for your DVD drive in the firmware-flash.com
collection of unofficial firmware files. Note that most of these
files require you to boot to DOS or Windows to install.
You can buy a separate DVD drive for each DVD region that you
wish to use. The prices for DVD-ROM drives have dropped low enough to make
this strategy feasible.
Of course, you can simply do nothing, and rely on the
built-in ability of Linux software to bypass the region restrictions.
Note that even in this case you should use the regionset program to
set the drive to the region that you will be using the most, because an
RPC-II drive without a region setting behaves as if
all the regions are locked out.
X Video Overlay
The XFree86 video overlay extension is a very poorly documented
standard feature of XFree86 4.x and is absolutely
essential for high quality video playback under Linux. It is
the only type of hardware playback acceleration that is widely
supported in Linux, and it is by far the single most important
configuration element for DVD playback on a Linux system.
To check if you have this extension, type
xvinfo in an X terminal. If the command returns
several screens full of important-looking output, then congratulations,
you have hardware video overlay and you need not worry about it anymore.
If, on the other hand, xvinfo returns with a negative answer like:
# xvinfo
X-Video Extension version 2.2
screen #0
no adaptors present
then that means you don't have hardware overlay support. See for tips
on how to get overlay support working.
Enabling DMA
DMA drive access is critical for DVD playback because it lowers
the CPU overhead of disc reading and leaves more of the CPU free for
video playback. On most systems, enabling DMA support for the DVD drive
means the difference between choppy playback and smooth playback.
To see if you have DMA enabled, type (as root) the
command# hdparm -d /dev/hdc
(replacing /dev/hdc with
your DVD drive's actual device name). If DMA is already on, then you're
done. Otherwise, you should turn it on by typing hdparm -d 1
/dev/hdc. You may want to add this command to a startup
script such as /etc/rc.d/rc.local to ensure that
the DMA support is active every time your computer boots.
See the section
if DMA won't turn on even after you've typed the command to turn it
on.
Software Installation
Here we cover the installation of the DVD playback software on various
Linux distributions. For each Linux distribution we indicate how to
install MPlayer, Xine, Ogle, and VideoLAN onto the system. These
are the four most popular software packages for DVD playback in Linux.
Usage instructions for these programs will be given in the next section.
Read the section that corresponds to your Linux distribution. All
of the installation commands given below should be run as root.
Red Hat / Fedora
If you run Red Hat Linux or Fedora, you can download all of the
DVD playback software from the FreshRPMS package repository. Since
there are so many packages needed for DVD playback, the easiest way to
install all of them is to use apt-get. Here's how
to do it:
Follow the link to the version of apt that matches your Red Hat
version:
Fedora
Core 1
Red Hat
Linux 9
Red Hat
Linux 8
Red Hat Linux 7.3
Download the appropriate binary x86 RPM package (in this example,
apt-0.5.15cnc3-0.1.fr.i386.rpm) and install it
using the rpm command as follows:# rpm -Uvh apt-0.5.15cnc3-0.1.fr.i386.rpm
Run the
commands# apt-get update
# apt-get install mplayer xine ogle_gui
to have apt install everything for you.
Special note about VideoLAN and Red Hat
The FreshRPMS repository contains the
videolan-client package for Red Hat 9 and Red Hat
7.3, but not for Red Hat 8 or Fedora Core 1. If you want to install
VideoLAN on Red Hat 9 or Red Hat 7.3, you can just type
apt-get install videolan-client and let the
program take care of it for you. Fedora Core 1 users who want VideoLAN
will need to visit the official VideoLAN
Red Hat page instead, and follow the instructions there. I do not
recommend that Fedora users install VideoLAN, since the VideoLAN
packages interfere to a large degree with the FreshRPMS packages installed in the previous step.
There appears to be no easy way to install VideoLAN on Red Hat 8.
Debian
These instructions are for Debian, stable only (3.0r1 as of
this writing) -- it is assumed that if you run testing or unstable versions
then you should already know what you are doing.
Make sure the following lines are in your
/etc/apt/sources.list
file:deb http://hpisi.nerim.net/ stable main
deb http://www.interq.or.jp/libra/oohara/debian-unofficial/ ./
deb http://download.videolan.org/pub/videolan/debian woody main
(The first line is for MPlayer, the second is for the Xine CSS
plugins, and the third is for VideoLAN.) Then run the
commands:# apt-get update
# apt-get install mplayer-686 mplayer-fonts mplayer-doc ogle
# /usr/share/doc/ogle/examples/install-css.sh
# apt-get install xine-ui xine-d5d-plugin xine-d4d-plugin gnome-vlc libdvdcss2
Slackware
The best site for Slackware add-on packages is . You can use their search
engine to find and download the Ogle, Xine, MPlayer, libdvdcss,
libdvdnav, libdvdread, lame, and a52dec packages from the web site. Put
the packages into a single directory and run
pkgtool to install the packages onto your
system.
For VideoLAN, you will have to build it from
source since there is no precompiled package on the LinuxPackages web
site yet. To make matters worse, the version of mpeg2dec included
with Slackware 9.1 is too old to be used with VideoLAN, so you have to
compile a newer version of mpeg2dec as well.
That said, if you still want to install
VideoLAN, then download the latest source packages for mpeg2dec and VideoLAN and run the following
commands. Note that you have to disable ffmpeg support for the VideoLAN
build because the Slackware MPlayer packages omit some of the header files
needed by ffmpeg.# tar xzvf mpeg2dec-0.4.0.tar.gz
# cd mpeg2dec-0.4.0
# ./configure
# make
# make install
# cd ..
# tar xzvf vlc-0.7.0.tar.gz
# cd vlc-0.7.0
# ./configure --disable-ffmpeg
# make
# make install
Mandrake
Mandrake users can get packages for all of the video programs from
the Penguin Liberation Front
web site. The fastest way is to visit the Easy Urpmi site and follow the
instructions to generate a listing of the commands you need to type for
PLF access in urpmi. You should then type in the commands returned by
the web site to set up your system for PLF access.
After you have set up PLF access, type:
# urpmi.update -a
# urpmi mplayer libdvdcss2 xine-ui ogle ogle_gui vlc
to install all the video programs.
SuSE
The YaST package program included with SuSE works only with
official packages, and there are no official packages that support DVD.
Therefore you will have to install the packages for all of the DVD
software manually.
MPlayer and Xine packages for SuSE are available on the PackMan site.
For MPlayer, you need the MPlayer, lzo, and xvid packages on that
page as well as the additionally needed binary packages
listed
on the page for each package. SuSE 9.0 users should note that as of this
writing the MPlayer package for SuSE 9.0 has a broken
libsmbclient.so.0 dependency. You can work around
this problem with the commands# rpm -Uvh --nodeps MPlayer-1.0pre3-pm.1.i686.rpm
# ln -s libsmbclient3.so.0 /usr/lib/libsmbclient.so.0
To install Xine, you should download and install the
libxine1-dvd and xine-ui packages from PackMan.
Encrypted DVD support in Xine also requires installing
libdvdcss from the VideoLAN site.
Ogle can be installed using the Red Hat
RPMs from the Ogle site. SuSE 9.0 users who want to install the
Ogle_gui package will also need to install
orbit,
gdk-pixbuf,
gnome-libs, and
libglade from SuSE 8.2.
VideoLAN users will need to download the Red Hat
RPMs from the VideoLAN site and install them forcibly using
rpm --nodeps. The VideoLAN packages also require
XFree86-compat-libs
and freetype
from SuSE 8.2 in order to run.
Gentoo
The basic command to use is:# emerge sync
# USE="dvd mmx sse" emerge mplayer xine-ui vlc ogle-gui
If you have an AMD processor, you should type USE="dvd
mmx 3dnow" instead of using the sse flag.
Athlon XP owners can use the 3dnow and
sse flags together.
Software Usage
Although I have tried very hard to keep this HOWTO focused on practical
advice instead of abstract theory, it is necessary to have some minimal
background in television video in order to understand how to get the
best possible video quality under Linux.
General principles: deinterlacing, telecine, and framerates
Regular television video is interlaced, meaning
that the odd-numbered scanlines are recorded (and displayed) first,
followed by the even numbered scanlines, then the odd ones again, then
the even ones again, etc. Each individual line is displayed 30 times a
second (or 25, depending on where you live), but because of the
interlacing, the television image as a whole is refreshed 60 times a
second (or 50), with only half of the total lines being refreshed each
time.
In general, with interlaced motion pictures, there is no way to
reconstruct any single video frame perfectly without artifacts. This
point is important enough to repeat: there is no way to
perfectly reconstruct any single frame! The reason is that
the odd-numbered lines are recorded onto the video tape with a timing
skew of one half-frame relative to the even-numbered lines. If the video
picture is still, this timing skew is no problem, but for moving
pictures it causes half the lines to be displaced from the other half.
On a television screen, you can't see this displacement, since TV
screens (except for high-end HDTV monitors) are of such low quality that
the artifacts aren't visible. However, on a computer screen, this
displacement is very visible and causes comb-like artifacts to appear in
the video. You can see screenshots of interlacing artifacts in the
interlacing
section of Luke's Video
Guide.
How to fix interlacing artifacts
The process of removing interlacing artifacts is called
deinterlacing. Unfortunately, all deinterlacing
techniques are imperfect to some extent, and there is no single method
which works best in all situations. It is therefore important to
experiment with all of the different possible deinterlace settings to
see which one works best for a particular disc.
users can get a list of deinterlacing options
by typing mplayer -pphelp at the command line.
Find the option that you want to use, and then use the -vf
pp=<option> syntax to activate the option. For example,
I usually use the lb option, which is
done with the command: mplayer -vf pp=lb, followed by
whatever other options you would normally use to play the DVD.
users can right-click on the movie to get a
list of deinterlacing options (under Video
Settings or Deinterlace,
depending on the program version).
has a list of
deinterlacing options in the configuration panel; to get to it, right-click on the movie window, open the
Settings Setup
dialog, set Configuration experience level
to
Advanced
, and then look for Software deinterlace
method
under the Video
tab.
has no deinterlacing support, so it is not
recommended to use Ogle for watching interlaced video.
Telecined video
This section only applies to video in NTSC format (used in North
America, east Asia, and parts of Latin America) -- PAL users (the rest of
the world) can skip ahead.
The one exception to all of the above discussion about interlacing is in
the case of telecined video. Briefly put, telecine
is a special kind of interlacing that is done only to theatrical (i.e.
cinematic) movies and some forms of hand-drawn animated shows. The
special thing about telecine is that it can usually be perfectly undone.
The details are too complicated to explain here, but you can read about
it in Luke's
Video Guide or Bob Niland's
FAQs if you're curious.
The process of undoing the telecine artifacts is called
inverse telecine. The good news is that inverse
telecine, done properly, fully restores the original video quality of
the source video with no artifacts whatsoever. The bad news is that
is the only player program in the world right
now that can perform inverse telecine.
To perform inverse telecine in MPlayer, simply add the
-vf ivtc option to the MPlayer command. This
option is the right one to use if you are watching a movie you know
originated as a theatrical release, or if you are watching animated
shows. Warning: this option is very CPU intensive. You need at least a 1 GHz
processor to even think about doing it.
How come Windows users don't have to deal with all this?
Windows DVD players hide most of the complexity of DVD playback
and fall back to the lowest common demoninator when playing DVDs. The
result is that you get playback quality which is decent in a wide range
of situations but not always the best that can be achieved in any given
situation. For example, no Windows DVD player in the world has an
inverse telecine filter like MPlayer does, so telecined material always
looks dramatically worse in Windows than in MPlayer under Linux.
Specific usage instructions
Here we give specific instructions for launching basic DVD
playback in the various player programs. These commands only cover the
basic steps of operating each program. You are encouraged to refer to
the man pages of each program for further instructions.
Put the DVD that you want to play into your drive before
attempting playback.
MPlayer
Type mplayer dvd://1 to begin playing title
#1 on the disc. To play other title numbers, substitute the appropriate
number in place of 1.
Old versions of MPlayer, such as the one used in Debian, require
the command mplayer -dvd 1 instead. In some cases
you also have to explicitly add the option -vo xv
in order to make MPlayer use the hardware video overlay port.
Subtitle and audio options for MPlayer have to be specified on the
command line. The format is -alang NN or
-slang NN where NN is the two-letter
language code of the language you want. For example, to play back
Japanese audio with English subtitles, type:# mplayer dvd://1 -alang ja -slang en
on the command line.
Xine
Simply type xine at the command prompt to
start the program.
The first time you start the program, it will display a
configuration screen with a bunch of options. In most cases you can
leave all of the options at the defaults.
The program has a graphical console with a row of labeled buttons
along the bottom. Press the DVD button to start playing the DVD. (However, if
your version of Xine has a D5D button, use that instead.)
Xine supports DVD menus, so you can set language or subtitling
options as you normally would via the disc's own menu.
Ogle
Type ogle to start the program. Depending on
which version of the program you have, it may start playing the DVD
automatically. If it doesn't, then click on the File
menu and select Open Disc to begin reading
the disc.
Ogle, like Xine, supports DVD menus for setting the language or
subtitling options.
VideoLAN
Use the vlc command to bring up the VideoLAN
GUI and click on the disc icon to open the disc and start playing.
Right click the playback window to bring up the options menu, which
includes deinterlacing, audio, and subtitle options.
Troubleshooting
xvinfo returns no adaptors
present
Make sure you are running XFree86 4.1 or above. You can find
out your version of XFree86 by typing X
-version at the command prompt.
Use an appropriate driver for your video card. Some Linux
distributions default to using the generic XFree86 VESA driver instead
of the specific driver for your video card. You need to use the
hardware-specific driver for your card in order to get hardware
overlay support.
ATI users should try downloading the improved ATI XFree86
drivers from the GATOS home page, or from the
official ATI
Linux support page.
NVidia users should try downloading the official NVidia
Linux drivers for their video card.
Sometimes upgrading XFree86 can provide you with an
improved driver that has hardware overlay support, but such an upgrade is
beyond the scope of this HOWTO.
xvinfo works but overlay output is
garbled
Problems with garbled or missing overlay output usually mean
that you don't have enough video RAM to hold both the regular desktop
display and the video overlay display at once. Typically you need twice
as much video RAM as normal at a given video resolution in order to use
hardware video overlay. In some cases you may even need 3 to 5 times more
RAM because of internal buffering in the video card.
The only easy way to lower your video RAM requirements is to
switch to a lower video resolution while playing videos.
DMA isn't working
You can tell that DMA is broken if using the command
hdparm -d1 on your DVD drive returns a message like the
following:# hdparm -d1 /dev/hda
/dev/hda:
setting using_dma to 1 (on)
HDIO_SET_DMA failed: Operation not permitted
using_dma = 0 (off)
The only way to fix this problem is to compile a kernel with DMA support
for your particular chipset. It is beyond the scope of this HOWTO to
explain how to compile a kernel, but the steps which are particularly
relevant to DMA support are as follows:
Download a recent kernel so that
you have the greatest possible chance of DMA being supported on your
chipset.
Unpack your kernel and type make
xconfig
in the kernel build directory. Under ATA/IDE/MFM/RLL support
,
select IDE, ATA, and ATAPI Block devices
and enable
Generic PCI bus-master DMA support
and Use DMA by
default when available
.
On the same page there are several dozen chipset-specific DMA
drivers that continue downward for several screens. Find and select one
relevant to your chipset, if there are any. For example if you have
an AMD Athlon based VIA chipset, enable the VIA82CXXX chipset
support
item.
For more information on compiling kernels, see the Kernel HOWTO as
well as the Linux
Ultra-DMA Mini-Howto.
Video playback is choppy
On a fast enough computer (say, over 1 GHz), choppy video
playback usually means that your overlay support or DMA support is
misconfigured. See the previous troubleshooting items.
On a very slow computer (say, 0-500 MHz), there is nothing
you can do short of hardware upgrades to make DVD playback run well.
For borderline computers (anything in between), you can
gain a modest (~10%) performance boost by upgrading from kernel 2.2 to
kernel 2.4 and using an SSE-optimized player program like
MPlayer.
Finally, if all else fails, run MPlayer with the option
mplayer -framedrop to patch over occasional glitches
in video playback.
Sound playback is choppy
The most common cause of sound playback problems is from
sound cards that do not support 48 kHz audio playback. For people in
this category, I strongly suggest that you purchase a new sound card.
Even a cheap PCI sound card can give you a substantial upgrade in sound
quality for less than the cost of two DVDs.
Failing that, you can lighten the load on your sound playback
system by not using a sound daemon such as ESounD or aRts and playing
the DVD audio directly to the OSS driver. To do this with MPlayer, run
mplayer -ao=oss along with whatever other options
you normally use.
Out of region discs play back garbled
In the past, older versions of most of the programs
discussed here have had trouble decrypting out-of-region discs. The
result of a failed decryption looks like the colored video noise that
you see.
Upgrading to the newest available version of any of the
programs should solve this problem.
Out-of-region discs hang on playback
Watch the DVD drive's access light while the program is
hanging. Is the light still blinking in an access pattern? If it is (and
usually it will be), that means the program is still in the middle of
decrypting the disc.
Decrypting the DVD involves mounting a fairly
large-scale computational effort to recover the key. It is not at all
unusual for a computer to take five or even ten minutes to decrypt a
single DVD key.
In-region discs never have this problem because the DVD drive
firmware automatically decrypts discs that match with the drive's own
region.
Further Information
Dag
Wieers' overview of the Linux DVD playback programs
Moritz
Bunkus's DVD ripping guide for Linux