My Tech Notes

DVD players are cheap these days, but not all of them are born equal. The best player is my humble opinion is DVP3960, which can play virtually all known types of video files, and nearly all DVD writable media.

The only think which is worth to know (and this is the reason I am publishing it here) is so-called "region-free" hack. Copying from http://forum.videohelp.com/topic331294.html,

Power Up the unit with NO Disc in the tray.
Open the tray
Press the SETUP Button on the remote control
Navigate to the PREFERENCES page using the Right Arrow Key
Press the DOWN ARROW one time to select
Press the 1 button on your remote control
Press the 3 button on your remote control
Press the 8 button on your remote control
Press the 9 button on your remote control
Press the 3 button on your remote control
Press the 1 button on your remote control
The current Region Code Setting will display
Use the UP/DOWN Arrow Keys to select the region required or '0' for All Regions
Press the PLAY Button on the remote control

Labels: hardware, video

After a few attempts, I successfully made Russian subtitles to work correctly in mplayer. Here how it works:

• Download Cyrillic bitmap fonts from mplayer site (there are other collections there that might work as well);
• Unpack anywhere you want;
• Edit font.desc file, removing references to non-existing font files;
• Download (for instance, from here) or prepare subtitles (I used .srt file) in Windows (1251) encoding;
• Run mplayer like that:
  gmplayer -font <full path to font.desc> -sub <full path to .srt file> ...
• Don't forger that mplayer saves its options in ~/.mplayer directory and re-uses them by default, so on your next invocation either use your "default" parameter like -font /usr/local32/share/mplayer/font/font.desc, or remove relevant files from ~/.mplayer .

Labels: mplayer, video

Well, the next best thing after using gmplayer is copying (protected) DVDs. Number of good utilities exist under Windows, e.g. free DVD Decrypter and non-free but very good Magic DVD Ripper. Here we will cover what is available under Linux.

First, very good review, and only slightly outdated, is available in Gentoo Wiki. In fact, from all the tools mentioned there I only tried the simplest one: dvdbackup.

Here is what to do:

1. Install libdvdcss ;
2. Install libdvdread . Run configure command like that: ./configure --with-libdvdcss-libs=/usr/local/lib
3. Get dvdbackup;
4. Goto "src" subdirectory;
5. (optional) Consider applying this patch;
6. Compile dvdbackup like that: gcc -I/usr/local/include dvdbackup.c -o dvdbackup /usr/local/lib/libdvdread.a /usr/local/lib/libdvdcss.a -ldl (Note: linking libdvdread.so does not work for some reason, but feel free to use libdvdcss.so)
7. Copy dvdbackup to /usr/local/bin or whatever
8. Use like that:
   (to copy DVD)
   dvdbackup -v 4 -M -i /media/cdrecorder -o ~/mytopdir -n my_name
   (to get info)
   dvdbackup -i /media/cdrecorder -I

P.S. To use gmplayer to watch a movie dumped to hard drive use command like that:

gmplayer dvd://1 -dvd-device ~/mytopdir/my_name

Labels: linux, mplayer, video