i've been having an array of issues lately with X and with playing dvds and i was hoping for some input in this area. ok, here's the deal. i'm having three different problems, but they all may be related:
problem 1.
starting up by box will bring me to kdm, and if i select "kde-3.1" all is good and i can go about writing you this email. but if i (or any other user) select "X-Session" the kdm window disappears and i get a single white box appearing with the following message inside:
What (if anything) is in ~/.xsession or ~/.xinitrc?
Since you are using KDM, check in ~/.xsession-errors for error messages.
problem 2.
i just went out and bought "babylon 5 season 1" on dvd. discs 1 and 2 play well in mplayer (well, the audio sync needed adjusting and there were dropped frames, but it's what i've come to expect from dvds in linux) but playing any track on disc 3 brought up a garbled, mostly-green screen with the audio (mostly clear) in the background. no amount of fiddling seemed to help. the disc plays just fine in windows though (took me an hour to track down and install the drivers and authenticate with a stupid serial.... this is why i like free software).
From below, you have an Athlon 800 - should be fine for power. I've run dvd's on a PIII/600.
Check to see that you are using dma on your DVD drive (it has a tendancy to go away when the drive cracks the keys or is interrupted - a fallback from error conditions returned from the drive). If you aren't using DMA, that might explain the choppiness. You can check dma status with:
/sbin/hdparm -d /dev/dvd
.... and turn dma on with:
/sbin/hdparm -d1 /dev/dvd
As for one DVD not working at all - I'm not sure. You might want to check to see if anyone else has this problem on DVD forums. It might be a glitch in the encoding that the windows DVD software is properly recovering from. This happens from time to time.
problem 3.
in an effort to play disc 3 in linux, i tried to emerge xine-ui and xine-dvdnav. but the emerge fails on one of the dependencies: "xine-lib" (see "blob" at the end of this email).
Meh, emerging xine became a mess with 1.0beta. You might try emerging something newer (I'm using 1.0beta2-lib).
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