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So far Warpvision supports the key elements of a DVD player including MPEG2 video playback and support for AC3 audio decoding (no DTS.) For people with slower systems, it also supports hardware acceleration for YUV transformations using the Hardware EnDIVE driver if you have a supported video card. Two key things missing from the end-user point of view, are support for DVD menus and subtitles. While some might question the usefulness of subtitles, I find them particularly useful when watching movies in loud environments such as airplanes. Since this player is based on a number of Linux projects and some of the Linux players are just now adding DVD menu and subtitle support, hopefully these will follow some time in the future.

GUI vs. Command Line

WarpVision's playlist allows you to play single videos or sequence as many as you need. Plus it gives you all the info you might need about each file.

[Click to view full size.]

Making it Work

[DVD] audio stream: 0 audio format: ac3 (stereo) language: en aid: 128
[DVD] audio stream: 1 audio format: ac3 (5.1) language: en aid: 129
[DVD] audio stream: 2 audio format: ac3 (stereo) language: es aid: 130

So from the above, if you wanted the English stereo Dolby AC-3 soundtrack, you would add -aid128 to your command line to select the AC3 stereo soundtrack.

The basic command to play a DVD is

wvision -dvd1 d:

This selects the first title on the DVD in drive d: There are a number of other command line options that let you adjust the audio, video and aspect ratio settings to be used by the player.

If you're having problems getting WarpVision to work, have a close look at the output during startup for anything that looks funny, it is quite likely you can find the reason for your problems there. Also, make sure you read the README file, as there is an external DLL you need to download and install before it will work.

Audio and Video Quality

Picture quality at a DVD's native resolution is very good, with no noticeable picture artifacts, jaggies, color banding, or obvious compression artifacts. People running slower PC's can expect a few dropped frames however. I did notice that it gets a little pixelicious when it is stretched to fullscreen (1280x1024). The screenshot below shows this as jagginess in diagonal lines. I have yet to see a software DVD player do as nice a job of stretching the video image as my Creative Labs Dxr3 hardware MPEG2 decoder.

At fullscreen resolution, the DVD player used about 50% of the available CPU on my test system. The test system for this article was a Pentium 4 1.8GHz with a GeForce 4 Ti 4400 video card.

Problems

libdvdread: Can't seek to block 256
libdvdread: Can't open file VIDEO_TS.IFO.
Can't open VMG info!

Apparently this is a common problem with the library they use to access the encrypted content on the DVD disks, as a number of Linux products built on the same library have the same problem.

I also noticed that the audio is not necessarily in sync with the picture. Fortunately you can use the +/- keys to adjust the timing, and once adjusted, it seems to stay in sync quite well.

Fast forward or rewind, as well as chapter selection also seem to fail most of the time. In the past, these sorts of features have come later in development.

Unfortunately the biggest problem for me was that quite often it would simply quit after a while, claiming it had reached the end of the video stream, although there was lots of movie left. The most I had it play of a single DVD was about 20 minutes. I tried selecting different chapters, and adding multiple VOB files to the playlist in the GUI version, but still no luck. Perhaps I'm doing something wrong.

Summary