[MPlayer-users] General DVD Questions

[Martin McCormick]

Eli C writes:
>I was going to say something about how impressive it is that you are able to u
>se computers
> blah blah blah.  But I'm sure you get that all too much.

	There are many UNIX users who are blind around the world
because UNIX has the very strict standard input and output devices
which makes it easy to use various methods for intercepting the output
of programs that were never written with any thought to use by people
who are blind.  To me, that is the ultimate universal design because
it lets me do my thing and you do your thing and it all still works
without anybody having to be frustrated because some poor and
unsuspecting programmer didn't think about it.  The only applications
in UNIX that leave my blood boiling are the Windows transplants that
tend to be commercial applications and nobody cares whether or not
they will work on a command line.  If you can actually find somebody
to complain to, the response is sort of like, "What?? We worked really
hard to make it this way."  To which my response, is "Ye' and you
broke it."  It's really annoying if it is something you need at work
and there's no Plan B.:-)


>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.

	My thanks to the three of you who responded so far.  I was
wondering if that menu was a bit-mapped image or ASCII in various
languages with font directives so you answered that question.  I was
hoping it was like a web interface, using some kind of markup
language, but I guess that would have put too much firmware inside the
DVD player.

	It sounds a lot like it will be similar to playing audio CD's
in which the table of contents is what the little calendar display on
the CD player reads to show which track plays for how long.

	That is still usable.  Having to come up with a script as one
of you described is no big deal compared with not being able to use
the system at all.

	Being that I work for a university in Network Operations, I
never know what new problem will need to be solved tomorrow or next
week so it is good to know what to expect.  I am not a Windows expert,
but I get the impression that UNIX systems are generally better at
scripted and automated operations which command-line programs like
mplayer can work with nicely.

	I've already used mplayer -dumpstream -playlist in conjunction with an
at job to record an audio program that was on at 04:00 one morning.
Unfortunately, I miscalculated the time zone for Central Europe and
was off by an hour, but the at job fired off as planned and I got a
recording, just the wrong one.

	For anyone who is interested, the at utility preserves your
login settings such as path and current working directory but cron
doesn't do that which means that you must use one of several methods
for setting all that information when the cron job runs or all you'll
get is an error message mailed to root stating your application
couldn't find executables if they weren't in /bin or /usr/bin, etc.

	As long as the environment gets set up right, an at or cron
job will run just like it would if you were setting at the keyboard.
You just don't have to get up at 4 o'clock to make it run.

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