A couple questions about playing DVDs

Matt Galvin matt.t.galvin at gmail.com
Sun May 29 04:37:27 UTC 2005


> 1) For some reason totem-gstreamer just won't play my movies
> properly. In particular, it can't seem to access the DVD
> menu on Almodovar's _Bad Education_. But totem-xine works
> just fine. Any idea why this is? I haven't the faintest clue
> what the difference between the two totems is.

gstreamer needs work ;) I use the xine backend for totem also.

> 2) The default subtitle font is quite ugly. How does one
> change that font? It really seems like this ought to be a
> Totem preference, but it's not.

I'm not sure as i never use subtitles, but you might have luck
starting up xine-gui and trying to set prefs there.

> 3) Only with DMA turned on via hdparm -- which the kind
> folks on this list introduced me to weeks ago -- does DVD
> playing proceed smoothly. However, if I turn DMA on at
> bootup (via /etc/hdparm.conf), I get all kinds of flakiness
> in the boot process -- SeekErrors, long delays, timeouts
> during the LVM startup, etc. Has anyone else had these
> problems with hdparm? And can you suggest any way out of
> them? My solution up to now has been just to run hdparm
> after bootup, when I'm about to play a DVD or somesuch, but
> I'd prefer not to have to think about it. (My motto is: if
> Windows users don't have to think about it, and their user
> experience is fine, then I shouldn't have to think about it
> either.)

I don't actuall edit my /etc/hdparm.conf. I created my own "very"
little startup script in /etc/init.d/myhdparm, which just runs hdparm
-d 1 /dev/dvd... but... I set it to be that very last bootup script by
doing

ln -s /etc/init.d/myhdparm /etc/rc2.d/S99myhdparm

> Thanks for any advice.

Hope this helps,

Matt




More information about the ubuntu-users mailing list