How to watch DVDs on old slow box

R

robspop

I have a mini-atx box that is about 5 years old. It has a VIA CN700 chipset and 1GB memory (not further upgradeable).

I would like to run FreeBSD on it and be able to use it (amongst other things) to watch DVDs.

Under FreeBSD (9.1 i386) I have installed VLC from the ports collection as it seems to have disappeared from the packages collection. I accepted all the defaults and it compiled without error. However, I cannot get it to work properly: it does start to play a disk but freezes in the menu section if I click on Play. It will play a video that is on a USB stick so the problem seems to relate specifically to DVDs. I have checked and libdvdnav is installed.

My preference would be to use VLC so my first question would be: does anyone know how to get it going?

If there is no obvious solution, can anyone suggest an alternative? I have tried Xine and mplayer but both crash the system (Xine I believe really needs more resources than it has here). I have reluctantly tried totem but after installing a great number of other packages it did not seem able to find the DVD drive.

I'm using FVWM so, despite trying totem, I don't really want something that is too bound up with a particular desktop.
 
Ok, if it helps, though I am not sure there is that much more to say: the VIA mini-atx boards are fairly tightly integrated so the CN700 chipset covers pretty much everything (CPU and graphics). The only variable is the memory and that is already at maximum. There are no special drivers for them that I am aware of, and that is not really the problem anyway as I can play films from a USB stick.

OS is a fresh install of 9.1 i386. There is not much else on the machine as I will have to go down the Linux route if I can't get it to play DVDs (I have tried it with Crunchbang Linux and that worked fine). Because compilation is so slow all the X stuff was installed as packages, as was FVWM, and there is nothing else there besides dependencies of the various DVD players I have tried.
 
Have you tried ripping the DVD to see if the media player will handle playing the same video from the local hard drive? That or converting the media on the DVD to another format before viewing would probably work around the issue.
 
The integrated video card just may not have enough processing power to playback DVDs, especially without the specially tailored drivers by the manufacturer for windows that are not available on any other OS.
 
Thanks for the suggestions.

I do not think the problem is that the hardware just cannot do this because if I put Linux on the machine it will play DVDs.

I have tried ripping the DVD. First I did it on the mini-itx box: I used mplayer and got an out.vob file, but VLC would not play it properly - I get the sound but the video is frozen on the first frame. That seems to be what is happening when playing from DVD.

Then I tried the same thing on my desktop machine and it all worked fine, VLC could play the file. I copied this one over to the mini-itx box and result as before (sound but video frozen).

I suppose that narrows things down a bit: the system is not managing to deal with the video stream. Even the mouse cursor disappears within the frozen screen.
 
The video is integrated into the chipset. Strictly it's a VIA P4M800CE for which there is no special driver afaik.

# root@mini-itx:/home/paul # kldstat
Id Refs Address Size Name
1 7 0xc0400000 fd35e8 kernel
2 1 0xc7a1e000 c000 via.ko
3 1 0xc7a2a000 16000 drm.ko

shows the drivers that I believe are standard for this device.

I do fully understand that this system is not exactly super-modern and super-mainstream. It is not essential that I run FreeBSD on it; I would like to because it's what I use at home and at work so it would make my life a bit easier, but I could live with Linux if I have to.
 
You might be running the VESA Driver for that VIA graphics card. I suggest you to run a 240p or 360p because 480p might be too heavy for that machine. Devices from that time like 2004 or in between weren't able to run DVD because it was a new tech medium. My HP laptop is from that time (2004) and I'm only able to run 240p and 360p (ATI Mobility Radeon IGP 345m graphics accelerator with 16 MB, 32 MB, 64 MB or 128MB of video RAM and 4x AGP capability). Can you play a 480p file from YouTube?

Edit: Added my graphics card name.
 
Your chipset support VIA C7 CPU and have hardware MPEG-2 decoder. But I think you can not use this feature without appropriate drivers.

Did you try another player? Maybe it will solve the problem.
 
Mur77 said:
Your chipset support VIA C7 CPU and have hardware MPEG-2 decoder. But I think you can not use this feature without appropriate drivers.

Did you try another player? Maybe it will solve the problem.
Click to expand...

Yes, I agree with you, you should check the hardware accelaration option on VLC and see if you have changes in graphics performance.
 
Thanks again for all suggestions. However, can I reiterate a few points about the mini-itx box:
  • It is physically capable of playing DVDs because it will do so if I run Linux on it: Crunchbang 11 straight out of the box will play DVDs using VLC
  • It will play a TV program off a USB stick perfectly; I'm not sure of its exact resolution but it's high enough to look good on a large screen TV
  • It is about 5 years old and I have other hardware that is older than that but will play DVDs
  • Afaik there is no special driver for graphics for any O/S (except probably XP)
I have tried all the obvious VLC controls like graphics acceleration with no success. I have tried several other players (mplayer, Xtheater and Xine) with less success than VLC.

There is clearly some incompatibility problem since my hardware, FreeBSD and VLC are all capable of playing DVDs, just not together as currently set up.
 
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