Suse Linux 9.2 and encrypted DVD playback (xine, libdvdcss2, libxine, hdparm, DMA)

Sun, 12 Nov 2006 00:00:00 +0000

Although several linux video players (e.g. xine) do support playback of encrypted DVDs, Suse has crippled the libraries needed to do so. Thus none of the players/frontends included in Suse Linux 9.2 can play encrypted DVDs. What are encrypted DVDs? Essentially all commerical movies are released exclusively as encrypted DVDs. It is a pain in the ass, but actually can be cured. To play encrypted DVDs you need libdvdcss2. This is the famous hack, that was in the news and that obviously was not liked by the media industry. In some countries this software is illegal; in some others only the binaries are but the sourcecode is not. You can download a script that creates automatically an rpm for suse >= 9. Additionally you should replace or update the Suse Linux xinelib with the uncrippled version from Packman . Xine still opens a window that claims that it cannot play encrypted DVDs with a link to some site where you are supposed to read why not. This link is dead. Shame on you, Suse (or Novell); if you cripple your distro, please make sure that at least your explanatory links do work! Some DVD hardware is apparently additionally limited based on the country codes. The world has been split into eight regions and according to the will of the media industry the customer should only be allowed to watch DVDs released specifically for his region. There is a linux tool around with with you can switch your area code, but I don’t remember its name or URL as this was not necessary for my hardware.

Watching, ripping and converting DVDs (xine, mplayer, mencoder, dvd, iso image)

Sun, 12 Nov 2006 00:00:00 +0000

Both xine and MPlayer can play DVDs directly, but xine has a DVD navigation. In Mplayer you need to specify which movie (VOB file) you want to play:xine dvd:// mplayer dvd://3 If you just want to temporarily store the DVD on your hard disk it might be sufficient to create a DVD image:dd if=/dev/dvd of=rosenstrasse.iso The image can be mounted as follows:sudo mount -o loop rosenstrasse.iso /media/temp/ Xine can play a DVD from an iso image directly (without mouting the image):xine dvd://media/isos/movie.iso Note that you need to specify always the complete path even if the movie is in the current directory! Mplayer can play the individual VOB files from the image (however without subtitle support). I couldn’t make Mplayer to accept the iso image as dvd.For conversion to e.g. DivX/XviD the easiest is to use Mplayer/mencoder. First I extracted audio:mencoder dvd://1 -ovc frameno -o frameno.avi -oac mp3lame -lameopts abr:br=128 Then the 1. pass encoding:mencoder dvd://1 -nosound -oac copy -o /dev/null -ovc lavc -lavcopts vcodec=mpeg4:vbitrate=800:vhq:vpass=1:vqmin=1:vqmax=31 -vop scale -zoom -xy 640 -vf pp lb Then the 2. pass encoding:mencoder dvd://1 -oac copy -o file.avi -ovc lavc -lavcopts vcodec=mpeg4:vbitrate=800:vhq:vpass=2:vqmin=1:vqmax=31 -vop scale -zoom -xy 640 -vf pp lbIt is more difficult to extract the subtitles. You can either extract them as images (easier but bigger filesize) or then convert these images into textfiles (requires an OCR step).Extract subtitle images (from mounted iso image in this case):cat /media/temp/VIDEO_TS/VTS_01_?.VOB | tcextract -x ps1 -t vob -a 0x20 > movie.ps1 Convert subtitle images:subtitle2vobsub -i /media/temp/VIDEO_TS/VTS_01_0.IFO -p movie.ps1 -o movie_name Copy metadata:cp /media/temp/VIDEO_TS/VTS_01_0.IFO movie_name.ifo Play from VOB file directly:mplayer /media/temp/VIDEO_TS/VTS_01_1.VOB -vobsub movie_name -vobsubid 0 Play from avi file:mplayer movie.avi -vobsub movie_name -vobsubid 0

Xine on Michael’s Domain

Suse Linux 9.2 and encrypted DVD playback (xine, libdvdcss2, libxine, hdparm, DMA)

Watching, ripping and converting DVDs (xine, mplayer, mencoder, dvd, iso image)