I recently began installing FC4 on some old machines that I was preparing to sell. I thought I'd start using one of them just to check out some of the desktop items since I installed the "Personal Computer" configuration (as opposed to Server or Workstation).

I was surprised at a couple of things. One was that I could play DVDs by just shoving one into my DVD player. Fedora Core 4 comes with totem, a video player. However, after some research, I learned that to do DVD playing I'd need to install totem-xine. Now DVDs start playing automatically when I stick them in the drive. And they even play rather smoothly on this old Athlon XP1600+ with an old ATI 128MB Radeon 9700 Pro.

So what did I do? Well, without going into too much detail, I added the livna repository to yum, uninstalled totem, then installed totem-xine, then set the system preferences to start DVD playback when one was inserted.

To get livna configured, I ran this command:

rpm -ivh http://rpm.livna.org/livna-release4.rpm

To uninstall totem and then install totem-xine, I ran these commands:

yum remove totem
yum install totem-xine

Finally, within GNOME, I went to Desktop->Preferences->Removable Drives and Media Preferences and then chose the Multimeda tab. The second option down has a check box that I checked for "Play video DVD disks when inserted" and the command was already correct ("totem dvd://")

On a reasonable fast connection, the total time to complete this is under 5 minutes.

The final thing I had to do to fix the playback quality was, in totem, to go to "View->Deinterlace" to toggle the setting to on. This got ride of terrible tearing and other artifacts. Then switching to full screen mode is just a matter of hitting the F key. This makes for a great media player.

It may not be the best tool for the job. Many people prefer VLC (videolan client -- having little to do with LANs) and other players. I used this because it was mostly already configured and quite easy to get going.

I hope this will help someone else get it going even easier. At the least, I know where to search when I need this information again. :)

Posted by Shane on February 20, 2006 4:08 PM | Permalink