having gotten DVDs to play on my inspiron 8100, i thought i'd post a quick summary of what i did, and finish with a couple of questions. from www.freshrpms.net, to use ogle (i've never had good luck with xine, so someone else can jump in here if they want): alsa-lib libdvdcss libdvdread ogle ogle_gui and now for the fun part -- getting decent playback. since this involves DMA (among other possible things), i tested things on my hard drive first. some benchmark testing: # hdparm -t /dev/hda showed that i could speed things up nicely by enabling DMA: # hdparm -d 1 /dev/hda # hdparm -t /dev/dha (ooh, 5 times the throughput) you can make this setting permanent by adding the line USE_DMA=1 in /etc/sysconfig/harddisks. so, given that my DVD drive is technically /dev/hdb, i can enable DMA on that as well: # hdparm -d 1 /dev/hdb and that pretty much gives me nice, smooth playback. however, a caveat -- to set this on a permanent basis, you can't just rely on the USE_DMA line /etc/sysconfig/harddisks, since that file is only used as the default for actual disks, as i found out the hard way after reading /etc/rc.sysinit. instead, just create the file /etc/sysconfig/harddiskhdb, with the single line USE_DMA=1 and you're all set. yes, i know all this is pretty trivial stuff, but enough people have been asking about DVDs, i figure it was worth posting. comments? additions? rday p.s. i noticed that setting 32-bit IO support (EIDE_32BIT=1) didn't make a noticeable difference for the hard drive once DMA is already enabled. i suspect it wouldn't hurt, but it just didn't seem to have any benefit. (it *does* make a difference if DMA is not enabled, however).
