Getting Video

Just some notes on building and installing the requisite tools for DVD playback on the Via Epia SP800 (CN400 Chipset)... will clean up as time allows... see the sidebar for contact info if you have questions.

Building Xine:
I grabbed Debian's ALSA (Advanced Linux Sound Architecture) user-space packages first since I enabled ALSA support when I rebuilt the kernel... apt-get install libasound2 libasound2-dev. Configuring ALSA is as simple as running alsaconf and selecting the VIA sound driver.

Download source tarballs for xine-lib and xine-ui from http://xinehq.de
For xine-lib:
./configure --prefix=/usr
make && make install

For xine-ui:
./configure --prefix=/usr --x-includes=/usr/X11R6/include --x-libraries=/usr/X11R6/lib
I needed to patch the file src/xitk/oxine/Makefile. It does not include the X11 headers as specified in the ./configure command line. So just search for AM_CPPFLAGS = and add -I/usr/X11R6/include to the end of the line. Then,
make && make install

The last piece of the puzzle is to invoke xine and tell it to use the drivers we have just set up: ALSA for audio, and the Via XVMC driver for video. Let's say that you've backed up the Serenity DVD to /media/movies/SERENITY.iso. The command would then be:

xine -V xxmc -A alsa dvd:/media/movies/SERENITY.iso

Assuming that you have removed the CSS encryption from the DVD. That will be covered in the next lesson.

Note that we specify the "xxmc" video driver. Running xine --help shows that the more intuitively-named driver "xvmc" is available, but specifying that on the command line crashes xine. Using "xxmc" works, and we can tell that it's using the onboard MPEG accelerator because running top while watching the movie shows CPU utilization at around 3%. Contrast that to the un-accelerated driver, where CPU utilization will be around 20-30%.