[MPlayer-users] General DVD Questions

[Eli C]

Thu, 07 Jul 2005 12:19:27 -0500 | Martin McCormick <martin at dc.cis.okstate.edu>

> 	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.
> 	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 was going to say something about how impressive it is that you are able to use computers
 blah blah blah.  But I'm sure you get that all too much.
There is some expirementing with adding libdvdnav (http://dvd.sf.net) support to mplayer
for graphical menu navigation, but it is not usable yet.

The problem is that most dvd menus will likely be bitmap based, which will not
transfer well to text anything, without some fancy OCR and such.

Mplayer does however include libdvdread support, which means you can still play dvds
pretty easily.  There are some inconsistancies in DVD layout, but the vast majority of
commercial movies will have title 1 as the main movie, with the default audio track being
english (at least in the US).  In this case, you can just load the dvd in your drive and
run 'mplayer dvd://1 -dvd-device <path to dvd device>'
If you need different audio or subtitle languages, -alang <2 letter language code> and
-slang <code> can be added as well.  The special features and stuff are usually stored in
different titles, and any sort of full-length directors commentary usually is stored as a
seperate audio stream that can be accessed with the -aid option.

To look at the different audio/video streams and titles on dvds, I usually use a windows
program, ifoedit, under wine.  Don't know how well that would work for you.  mplayer -v
can also yield some useful output while playing dvds.

-- 

Thu:Jul:07:05
Eli C.