Modified: 23 Jul 2000
GGIDVD

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What is GGIdvd?

GGIdvd is a patch to mpeg2dec adding a LibGGI output target, and a patch to oms adding a command line player suitable for usage with the LibGGI output target.

Huh? What are mpeg2dec and oms?

mpeg2dec is an mpeg2 video decoder and viewer. oms is an Open Source DVD-player under development. Both are part of the LiViD project.

How do I get it?

Then what?

Run the ggidvd program and enjoy!
The oms documentation claims that it can play mpeg2 files, but I haven't got that to work, so you are restricted to playing DVD discs. The default device is /dev/dvd but you can specify another device on the command line. You can also start from a specific chapter with the -c chapter option.

Performance

As decoding is currently done completely in software you'll need a pretty fast machine to play DVD movies at full speed. My laptop with a 500MHz Pentium III Mobile processor seems to be just enough to play a DVD movie using LibGGI's fbdev-target.

Problems

Note that LiViD is still very alpha and constantly improved. If you are having problems a later version of LiViD might fix them.

Q: I can't get it to compile!
A: The version of LiViD I used wasn't all that straight forward to build. I'll be going on vacation for three weeks and haven't time to write more detailed instructions right now. When I'll get back I'll fix this and also try to put up a binary distribution of ggidvd.

Q: Why does ggidvd crash at startup?
A: Check for information messages prefixed with GGI:. the LibGGI output target will properly return an error code when it can't find a suitable visual (with a suiting DirectBuffer), but the LiViD code happily ignores that. :(

Q: Why does the playing always stop in the middle of movies?
A: There seems to be problems when switching chapters, until that is fixed you'll have to restart ggidvd using the -c option for each chapter...

Marcus Sundberg, [MAIL] marcus@ggi-project.org