4.1. CD-ROM drives

Playing standard Video CDs:

mplayer -vcd trackno [device]

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

Notes:
- Do NOT mount VCD disks and play DAT files directly! It may work under windows but won't work under linux. You have to play them directly, 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 device differs, then you have to make a symlink, or specify it in command line!

From Linux documentation:

Some CDROM drives are capable of changing their head-speed. There are several reasons for changing the speed of a CDROM drive. Badly pressed CDROMs may benefit from less-than-maximum head rate. Modern CDROM drives can obtain very high head rates (up to 24-times is common). It has been reported that these drives can make reading errors at these high speeds, reducing the speed can prevent data loss in these circumstances. Finally, some of these drives can make an annoyingly loud noise, which a lower speed may reduce.

The recommended way to do it is with a program called 'setcd' . It's kinda old, but won't be too hard to find on the Net. (UPDATE : new hdparm has an option for this !) Use it with :

    setcd -x [speed] [cdrom device]

Also you can try:

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

but you'll need root privileges. I use following command too:

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

for 2MB prefetched reading from the file (it's useful for scratched CDROMs). It's recommended that you tuneup your CDROM drive also with hdparm:

    hdparm -d1 -a8 -u1 (cdrom device)

to enable using DMA access, readahead, and IRQ unmasking. (if you don't understand these, *read the hdparm manpage*)

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

4.2. DVD playback

Yes, the real DVD support has been arrived. You don't need to play VOB files manually from disk thinking of the purpose of a file in the video_ts directory, you don't need worry it it's an encrypted disk or not (in old MPlayer you had to put '-dvdauth /dev/dvd' into the command line in case of encrypted discs), and you don't need even mount your disk to be able to play :)

IMPORTANT NOTE: please _DO_NOT_ require further features for DVD playback. This is the first version of some real DVD support inside MPlayer and we're busy with hunting bugs and implementing basic DVD player features.

MPlayer uses libdvdread which has got built in support for IFO parsing, reading navi blocks and doing authentication/descrambling. libdvdread uses libdvdcss to the latter tasks. So you will need libdvdcss and libdvdread downloaded, compiled and installed BEFORE you run ./configure script of MPlayer which will autodetect libdvdread for you in this way.

• Download source of libdvdread and libdvdcss.

  You can download them from http://www.dtek.chalmers.se/groups/dvd (click 'download' in the menu at the left, and you can find libdvdcss and libdvdread in a table).

• Compile and install libdvdcss THEN libdvdread.

  Read documentation of these packages to do this step easily.

• Recompile MPlayer.

  Run ./configure. If you install libdvdread correctly, ./configure says something similar:
  Checking for DVDread support ... yes
  (Of course you can put your favourite configure options into the command line when you run ./configure). That's it! Say: make, then make install.

Of course after installing libdvdcss and libdvdread you don't need recompile them at each time when you want to recompile MPlayer (from a new CVS version for example) since the needed packages have already been installed on your machine.

Using MPlayer to play DVDs:

Default device is /dev/dvd, you can change it in config.h (compile time option), or you can specify it as a filename for MPlayer:

    mplayer -dvd 1 /dev/dvd

    mplayer -dvd 2 -chapter 5 -dvdangle 2

4.3. DVD playback FAQ