Linux DVD
May 14, 2002
After reading a recent /. article comparing DVD players for Linux, I've embarked on a quest to get the "Star Wars Episode 1: The Phantom Menace" DVD working in Linux before Episode 2 comes out Wednesday at midnight. The quest will be successful if I can watch any part of the DVD, including special features and menus. Watching only the movie will be a partial success. Anything else is failure. So far, I have my hopes set on Xine. Last night, I managed to compile and install the latest version of xine along with support for encrypted DVDs and DVD menus. It seems to load the DVD properly, but then crashes with a segmentation fault when it tries to initialize sound. I suspect this may have something to do with KDE and its aRts sound system. When I get home today I'm going to see about fixing that. I'm also going to look into some of the other options available, such as Ogle and mplayer.
Yes, I could just reboot into Windows, but the goal here is MS independence. So far, I've managed it with everything except games and DVD-watching.