[MPlayer-users] General DVD Questions

[Martin McCormick]

	How much of the navigational data on a DVD are text-based?  As
a computer user who is blind, one of the headaches with using a
standard DVD player is all the navigation features one doesn't get.  I
downloaded mplayer to listen to streaming audio over the Internet and
discovered that its main purpose in life is actually to play movies.

	Presently, UNIX users who are blind have better luck with the
command line than with X.  There are some promising efforts to make
gnome accessible, but if you truly want to use the computer for lots
of different purposes, the GUI for blind users is not quite there yet.

	So, without X, can a person read the menu and select chapters
as well as play the whole disk or at least a movie all the way
through?

	I also know from our stand-alone DVD player that there seem to
be many variations in the way commercial DVD's are arranged so what is
true for one DVD is probably at least different for another.

	I figure this list should be a good resource for at least
knowing what kinds of data are stored to enable the navigation process.

	By the way, mplayer is great at playing the streaming audio I
wanted to here.  The only real problems appear to be web sites that
use so much cute javascript and obfuscation that the audio streams are
all but impossible to determine.  That's not a mplayer issue, however.

	This is not anything urgent at all, but more of a fact-finding
exercise to determine future plans.  Thank you.

Martin McCormick WB5AGZ  Stillwater, OK 
OSU Information Technology Division Network Operations Group