DVD images on hard drive/network drive

davidjneff · n00b Joined: 15 Dec 2005 Posts: 47

I'm fairly new to Gentoo, but I've never solved this with other Linux I've tried (Ubuntu, Fedora).

I have a Raid 5 networked attached Terrabyte server (buffalo). Only supports FTP and Samba, but works OK when I smbmount it. Its full of music, MP4, and DVD images. By the way, as an aside, when I'd just use Gnome to connect to the network drive Totem would play music and MP4 videos, but Mplayer wanted to copy them to the hard drive first! The Samba Mount took care of that mplayer quirk.

I can play real DVDs with Totem and Mplayer, but haven't been able to get DVD images -- the IFO type, I've never tried the ISO image -- to play back in anything.

My Windows Media Center PC can do it and Meedio on a tablet PC can do it. I've even played DVDs on the tablet PC via 802.11g (works OK if you aren't too far away and don't move it around alot). But so far, no luck in Linux. I don't think its unique to the network drive, I would assume the same issue exists if its actually on my hard drive, but I haven't had the free space to try it.

What am I missing? I have a couple old laptops I'm playing with using as "media extenders".

Anyone playing DVDs off a local hard drive? A Networked drive?

Thanks for any enlightement.

I'm generally pretty happy with Gentoo. I started playing with it because Ubuntu was locking up one of the laptps. In general, Ubuntu is fine for the masses, but Gentoo is faster (especially to boot), and as a former programmer/unix administrator/Linux based ISP owner/tweakaholic its now my favorite distribution. With the Totem Gstreamer mess would get straightened out (not just in Gentoo, Ubuntu also has problems with this), but Mplayer is generally working fine.

steveb · Advocate Joined: 18 Sep 2002 Posts: 4564

Did you tried to use CIFS instead of smbmount or smbfs?

cheers

SteveB

davidjneff · n00b Joined: 15 Dec 2005 Posts: 47

davidjneff · n00b Joined: 15 Dec 2005 Posts: 47

I forgot to mention Mplayer can play the individual .VOB files, or the .VOB files merged together. But it can't simulate the entire DVD experience of menus, special features, etc.

I did pop up the console window in Kmplayer, and saw it threw a video read error when I tried to open the VIDEO_TS.IFO file. I know I can merge the VOBs and play the movie, but I want the hard drive DVDs to have the same overall experience as actual DVDs. This is what Windows Media Center Edition and Meedio can do. Of course, in all fairness, my Media Center PC is using the InterVideo WinDVD sub system, and my tablet with Meedio using the NVIDIA DVD player codecs, so it can be tough for open source to compete against big business.

I know it also would make more sense to some degree to just convert them to MP4s, which are smaller and play just fine -- but no menus, chapters, bonus features, etc.