4.1 CD/DVD drives

Linux documentation excerpt:

Modern CD-ROM drives can attain very high head speeds, yet some CD-ROM drives are capable of running at reduced speeds. There are several reasons that might make you consider changing the speed of a CD-ROM drive:

• There have been reports of read errors at these high speeds, especially with badly pressed CD-ROMs. Reducing the speed can prevent data loss under these circumstances.
• Many CD-ROM drives are annoyingly loud, a lower speed may reduce the noise.

You can reduce the drive speed with hdparm or a program called setcd. It works like this:

    hdparm -E [speed] [cdrom device]

    setcd -x [speed] [cdrom device]

You can also try

    echo current_speed:4 > /proc/ide/[cdrom device]/settings

but you will need root privileges. The following command may also help:

    echo file_readahead:2000000 > /proc/ide/[cdrom device]/settings

This sets prefetched file reading to 2MB, which helps with scratched CD-ROMs. It is recommended that you also tune your CD-ROM drive with hdparm:

    hdparm -d1 -a8 -u1 (cdrom device)

This enables DMA access, read-ahead, and IRQ unmasking (read the hdparm man page for a detailed explanation).

Please refer to "/proc/ide/[cdrom device]/settings" for fine-tuning your CD-ROM.

4.2 DVD playback

MPlayer uses libdvdread and libdvdcss for DVD decryption and playback. These two libraries are contained in the libmpdvdkit/ subdirectory of the MPlayer source tree, you do not have to install them separately. We opted for this solution because we had to fix a libdvdread bug, and apply a patch which adds cracked CSS keys caching support to libdvdcss. This results in a large speed increase because the keys do not have to be cracked every time before playing. The cracked keys are stored in the ~/.mplayer/DVDKeys directory.

MPlayer can also use system-wide libdvdread and libdvdcss libraries, but this solution is not recommended, as it can result in bugs, library incompatibilities, and slower speed.

Support for DVD navigation via dvdnav is being worked on, but not finished yet.

Old-style DVD support - OPTIONAL

Useful if you want to play encoded VOBs from hard disk. Compile and install libcss 0.0.1 (not newer) for this (If MPlayer fails to detect it, use the -csslib /path/to/libcss.so option).

For the complete list of available options, please read the man page.

4.3 VCD playback

Playing standard Video CDs:

mplayer -vcd <track> [-cdrom-device device]

Examples:
mplayer -vcd 1
mplayer -fs -vcd 2 -cdrom-device /dev/hdc

• Do not mount VCDs to play the DAT files directly! It may work under Windows but will not under Linux. You have to play VCDs with the -vcd option.
• VCD disks usually have 2 tracks: a data track (containing autostart Windows playback program, karaoke data etc) and a mode-2 track (the movie). So try -vcd 2 first.
• The default VCD device is /dev/cdrom. If your setup differs, make a symlink, or specify the correct device on the command line with the -cdrom-device option.