Retail DVD Playback with mplayer on XO 1.5

I was curious to see if I could get this working and also how long it would take to compile mplayer on the XO 1.5.  Not the most critical of endeavors, but I haven’t even had these two units for 24 hours, so it’s not like I’ve wasted a bunch of time.

I installed libdvdcss and libdvdcss2 for retail DVD playback, but Totem couldn’t handle DVDs – it was like a slideshow.  Mplayer has very smooth DVD playback using about 40% of the CPU.  Obviously you’ll need an external USB DVD drive.

To compile mplayer on and for the XO 1.5, I pretty much followed the same instructions as I wrote up for the original XO on the OLPC News Forum.

http://www.olpcnews.com/forum/index.php?topic=4863

I did have to install these additional dependencies:

gtk2-devel
libpng-devel
zlib-devel

For DVD support, I installed these rpms:

http://dl.atrpms.net/f11-i386/atrpms/stable/libdvdcss2-1.2.10-5.fc11.i586.rpm
http://dl.atrpms.net/f11-i386/atrpms/stable/libdvdcss-1.2.10-5.fc11.i586.rpm
http://dl.atrpms.net/f11-i386/atrpms/stable/libdvdcss-devel-1.2.10-5.fc11.i586.rpm

If you want DVD menu support, install this dependency.  Keep in mind you’ll have to install libdvdnav on any XO 1.5 you want to use the resulting binary on.

libdvdnav-devel

If you don’t want DVD menu support, just cd into the mplayer source and:

./configure –enable-gui
make

For DVD menu support:

./configure –enable-gui –enable-dvdnav
make

It takes about an hour to compile, which is slightly faster than the XO-1.

As root, add the olpc user to the cdrom group.  Log out and log back in for it to take effect.

usermod -a -G cdrom olpc

Create your config file in  /home/olpc/.mplayer/config

[default]
vo=sdl
ao=alsa
framedrop=1
#lavdopts=skiploopfilter=all:fast=1 #DVD playback crashes with this

[protocol.dvd]
profile-desc=”profile for dvd:// streams”
alang=en
af=volnorm=1

[protocol.dvdnav]
profile-desc=”profile for dvdnav:// streams”
profile=protocol.dvd
mouse-movements=yes
nocache=yes


Installing and using on another XO 1.5

Installation without DVD Navigation Support

Drop the mplayer binary into /usr/bin on a freshly flashed XO 1.5, add olpc to the cdrom group, create olpc’s mplayer config file, and play a DVD without installing anything else – indeed, not even running updates.

To play a DVD, plug in your external DVD drive and

mplayer dvd://

Installation with DVD Navigation Support

The only difference from the above instructions is that you have to install libdvdnav (pulling in the libdvdread dependency) via yum.  You can play a DVD with the above command, or for the menus:

mplayer dvdnav://

I would suggest watching the movie proper with mplayer dvd:// and then, if you want to watch the “DVD Extras,” start the disc with mplayer dvdnav://  If the disc is nothing but interactive “special features,” that should work as well, though if you go full screen you won’t be able to use the mouse.

If subtitles show by default, you can toggle them on and off by hitting v.

Of course, here’s a picture!  Why, yes, that is a very young Bruce Campbell on the XO’s screen.

dvd_playback

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