[MPlayer-users] Two general questions about mplayer

[Malte Skoruppa]

Hi,

>
> That's partly from lack of manpower and partly a result of a
> philosophical decision. For MPlayer, unlike many other projects, it is
> actively expected - and, indeed, required for the submission of bug
> reports - that ordinary users will be running the latest development
> version, compiled from the publicly accessible SVN tree.
>   
All right, then. Maybe I'll start using the SVN version, although it
would be nice if there was a portage overlay or something built from the
SVN version (I'm using Gentoo), because I usually like to keep my system
clean and prefer not to install too many things manually.
> (...)
> I actually don't know. There has been quite a bit of progress on DVDs
> since the last release, with the addition (and/or expansion?) of support
> for dvdnav, but I do not remember to what extent if any it has had to do
> with menus.
>   
In any case, there is no dvd menu support in mplayer... or I would be
quite surprised ;-)
>> Are there possibly inofficial patches for mplayer somewhere out there
>> in the internet to add dvd menu support to mplayer, for the time
>> being (I googled, and I didn't find any; but you never know...).
>>     
>
> Not as far as I know.
>   
I continued my research after I received your mail and I found this:

http://onebithq.com/root/mplayer/dvdnav

This is a patch that's actually supposed to implement dvd menus.
However, it doesn't work perfectly well. After I managed to compile it
(for some reason, when I checked out rev 22492 and patched it using the
"all in one" patch provided on that site, I got errors in the compile
process; but the provided pre-patched tarball worked just fine), mplayer
displayed the DVD menu of my "Fight Club" DVD using

mplayer dvdnav://2

...and using

mplayer -mouse-movements dvdnav://2

...I could even get mplayer to recognize the mouse, and was able to
choose a title in the DVD menu by clicking on it, and mplayer played the
correct track. However, it is still not satisfying. I don't know why I
had to use dvdnav://2 rather than, e.g. simply dvdnav:/// or dvdnav://1
(I tried those first, they didn't work; the first displayed the menu for
a split second and then mplayer exitted, the latter directly played the
movie itself, without displaying any menu). So I'm guessing I kind of
have to guess the "track number" of the menu, or something like that.
Given that then very reason I want to have a DVD menu is that I don't
want to guess track numbers, this is going out of the frying pan and
into the fire ;-)
Furthermore, I couldn't find a way to "get back" to the main menu, once
I had chosen a track to play from the DVD menu.

So this patch, although a good start, is still not doing exactly what
I'd like it to do. Maybe I'm just missing something, too, because I have
to say it is poorly documented. If anyone knows something more about
this, I'd be glad to learn it :-)

Cheers,
Malte