Watch DVDs on Linux

We assume that you have an IDE DVD ROM drive. Connect the audio cable from the DVD drive to the CD-IN port of your sound card to listen to audio playback in the movie. Login as ‘root’. Install the three RPMs that are provided on the last month’s CD in the directory

cdrom/linux/dvd.

rpm —ivh libcss-0.1.0-1.i386.rpm



rpm —ivh oms-0.1.2-2.i386.rpm


rpm —ivh omi-0.1.0-0.20010303.rh62.i586.rpm

If while installing the last RPM you get a libz.so.1 dependency error, suffix –nodeps to the last command. The libcss RPM is required to decrypt encrypted movie data on the DVDs. The oms RPM installs a player named OMS (Open Media System) for playing DVD movies. The omi RPM provides a graphical (GTK) interface called OMI (Open Media Interface) to the

OMS player.

Create a symbolic link to the device file representing the DVD drive. The name of the device file depends on whether the DVD drive is connected as Primary slave, Secondary master or Secondary slave. See How Linux refers to IDE devices in the box above. Create the symbolic link as:

ln —s /dev/dvd

Now pop in the DVD disk in your drive. Open a terminal window within X Window and issue:

omi_gtk

You will see some text in the terminal window and also a graphical player pops up. Press the play button. You may get a prompt in the terminal window saying:

cannot open DVDDB cache file…… should I try to fetch it from the internet? (Y/n)

Press ‘n’ and subsequently the movie starts playing in a pop-up screen. Adjust the volume by using ‘K Sound Mixer’ or ‘aumix’. To bring them up issue ‘kmix’ and ‘aumix’ commands, respectively in a terminal window. Note that the procedure outlined in this article does not use any hardware DVD decoder like the DXR2 from Creative. Depending on your machine’s configuration, the playback may be slow. OMS player seems to have problems with some DVD ROM drives. You might face some quirks in audio playback. Refer to the site

http://www.no.linuxvideo.org/docs/wiki/moin.cgi/LividWiki

for possible solutions.