On 6 May, this message from Vinai echoed through cyberspace: > I wanted to try out playing DVD's under Potato PPC. So I grabbed a vlc > .tgz archive from www.videolan.org. Everything seemed to compile, but > on launching vlc, I get a window, the DVD drive spins for a while, but > nothing else seems to happen. I let it spin for a while in case it is > just really taking its time, but no go. > > Do I need a 2.4.* kernel with UDF support to run vlc ? Currently, I am > using a custom self-built kernel, compiled from the 2.2.19 sources from > kernel.org. I run the 3.3.6 version of XFree from potato 2.2r2 and this > is all on a Lombard/400/DVD.
First: move to 2.4 kernels. They have the DVD extensions for the CDROM driver, and they are a lot faster. I recommend BenH's rsync tree at panguinppc. Second, move to XFree 4, so that whatever DVD player software you use can use Xvideo to move the data to the display. That's the fastest way currently available on PPC. When you have these two done, test out the various DVD solutions. The one I found useabe is xine, of which Michel D�nzer has provided .debs (have a look at the list archives for the URL). I recommend the .debs, since you need quite some patches to make the published source work on PPC. I tried OMS as well, but that crashed bigtime. And, lastly, don't expect any impressive performance. Since xine has no support for accelerated hardware found in Macs, you end up doing _everything_ in software, and that takes time. I get around 35% frame drops on a TiBook G4/400. But you can actually watch the movie ;-) Cheers Michel ------------------------------------------------------------------------- Michel Lanners | " Read Philosophy. Study Art. 23, Rue Paul Henkes | Ask Questions. Make Mistakes. L-1710 Luxembourg | email [EMAIL PROTECTED] | http://www.cpu.lu/~mlan | Learn Always. "
