Playing DVDs in Linux with Xine 0.98

by , 5 February, 2002

Playing DVDs in Linux is a relatively straight-forward task, thanks to the superb Xine player. It can do more than play DVDs, like play MPEG-1 and 2 video, VCD, SVCD, and AVI, but clearly of interest to most is DVD playback. Released on the 16th January 2002, Xine 0.9.8 is the latest version at the time of writing, and only yesterday a GPL'd Windows alpha port was announced.

In Red Hat Linux 7.2, running KDE 2.2.1 (and no recompilation of the kernel, installation of an updated graphics driver, or tweaks of any kind), with a 1GHz Athlon, a 32Mb NVIDIA TNT2 graphics card, 128Mb RAM, and an ancient X2 speed DVD, I was able to get silky smooth fullcreen DVD playback in 1280x1024, 16-bit colour. Convenient since that's my usual setup. Obviously, running other applications slows things down, so be sure to close them first.

Step one: Download

Go to the site, and download at minimum, the following:

I went to the Skyblade Package Centre (linked from the Xine homepage) to download the (i686) Xine 0.98 RPMs. Here i586, i686, k6, and source RPMs are available as well as source tarballs in .tar.gz and .tar.bz2 format.

Step two: Install

Now, as root, I entered the following:

rpm -Uvh xine-lib-0.9.8-0.i686.rpm
rpm -Uvh xine-ui-0.9.8-0.i686.rpm
rpm -Uvh libdvdcss-0.0.3.ogle3-1.i686.rpm
rpm -Uvh xine-lib-arts-0.9.8-0.i686.rpm
rpm -Uvh xine-lib-d4d-0.9.8-0.i686.rpm
rpm -Uvh libdvdread-0.9.2-1.i686.rpm
rpm -Uvh xine-dvdnav-0.9.8.beta2-8.i686.rpm

/sbin/ldconfig
Registers library files (installed in the directories indicated in the /etc/ld.so.conf file).

ln -s /dev/cdrom /dev/dvd
Creates a symbolic from /dev/dvd to /dev/cdrom so Xine can locate my DVD drive.

Step three: Play DVD

Insert a DVD, enter xine, and right-click the Xine window so the play controls appear. Now either select the NAV button and then the play button to play the DVD right from the start and display the DVD's menu, or select the d4d button and then the play button to skip the start and the DVD's menu and go straight to playing the film.

Note that the second method doesn't allow you to move from scene to scene, or move to a specific part of a scene, and pressing the Escape key to return to the DVD's menu doesn't work with the first method.

Now press f to go into full-screen mode, then right-click to hide the play controls.

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