Playing/authoring DVD’s is so complicated in Ubuntu
February 19, 2007Okay I have a second Ubuntu complaint, to add to my previous one about the slowness of Firefox. It’s about the complexity of doing anything DVD-related in Ubuntu.
First off is the playing–it took me quite a bit of installing and un-installing packages to get the DVD player in Ubuntu to work properly. There’s already several media players installed with Ubuntu, but not the necessary bits to handle DVD’s. So I did some Googling and some experimenting and finally found the right combination of bits that make it work at least some of the time. The key is installing totem-xine (which should automatically un-install totem-gstreamer). Totem is apparently the name of the default media player in Ubuntu.
So now when I insert a DVD some of the time it starts playing. But there’s also been numerous crashes, especially when it’s on the menu screen of the DVD’s. Not sure what’s causing that, still requires additional Googling and twiddling.
Authoring a DVD (legally, not from ripping a pre-recorded DVD) is also convoluted. I still don’t seem to have the necessary bits–I’ve run the authoring tool but when I try to run the resulting DVD it either doesn’t play at all or I can only hear the audio with blank video.
Not nearly as seamless as getting Nero running on a Windows PC. So for now the PC in my living room, the one connected to my TV, will remain a Windows box. It’s going to take a while, if ever, before I get to the point where I can dispose of Windows XP Media Center.