[Slackbuilds-users] DVD reading, MPlayer, Xine, libdvdcss: SBo vs. Slacky

[Niki Kovacs]

Hi,

After a few months of being a bit unfaithful to my favourite 
distribution (at work, there were some things I could do with CentOS 
that I could not do with Slackware), I'm coming back "vers mes premiers 
amours".

I'm actually installing and configuring a lightweight XFCE-based 
desktop, and right now, I'm having some trouble with playing DVDs.

First thing I installed some multimedia libs from SBo that made sense:

- lame
- libdvbpsi
- libdvdcss
- libdvdplay
- libdvdread
- x264
- xvidcore
- mplayer-codecs-all

Then I built MPlayer with these. Only thing I changed to MPlayer was 
disabling the GUI in the ./configure options, since I only use it on the 
command-line.

Result: no way to play DVDs, I always got some errors either about 
"Error cracking CSS key" or something about zero length bla bla.

I tried Xine, and I got similar errors. No way to read a DVD.

Now on a whim I uninstalled everything and gave the slacky.eu 
"mplayer-megapack" a try. Although I don't quite agree with the 
packaging policy (put everything in a huge .tgz, argh), I gave it a spin 
anyway... and hey! DVD playing suddenly worked.

At first glance, there are two differences between the SBo and the 
Slacky version. 1) Slacky builds MPlayer against a bunch of 
dependencies, and 2) their libdvdcss is the CVS version.

I have a few days left before leaving for holidays (touring through 
Europe on my shiny old BMW R100R, the Slackware equivalent of a 
motorbike :oD ), so I'm gonna experiment in various ways and see if I 
can fix this and eventually contribute.

Cheers,

Niki