GStreamer DVD support

After getting a lot of updates on the GStreamer DVD menu support bugzilla entry, I figured it was time to make sure Jan Schmidt got some well deserved credit for the work he is doing getting the GStreamer DVD support fixed. Up to know people have had two choices for GStreamer based DVD playback, either Seamless which is a stand-alone DVD player, or using Totem. However the DVD playback you got in Totem using GStreamer up to know has been fairly basic, without DVD menu support for instance. With Jan’s ongoing work on his new resindvd plugin we are on the way to having full featured GStreamer-based DVD playback in Totem.

The resindvd plugin currently resides in plugins-bad, and Totem will automatically use it if you have it installed (and do not have the dvdnav plugin installed). Below is a screenshot of Totem displaying a fully functional DVD menu using the new resindvd plugin.

Minority report DVD menu

Only hick up I had was that was something weird happening in the Pulseaudio sink, so in the end I had to kill Pulseaudio to get audio to work when playing DVDs.

So if you like me are very excited about this stuff Jan is doing be sure to test it out and file bug reports if any of your DVD’s fail to work properly. You can also ping thaytan on IRC and tell him you will get him a beer at the next free software conference he attends :)

12 thoughts on “GStreamer DVD support

  1. @Tom: yes, Sebastian Dröge has been fixing up a brand new deinterlacer plugin based on the deinterlacer code from ‘tvtime’. The tvtime deinterlacer stuff is by many considered the best in open source (and maybe beyond?). The deinterlacer stuff is not integrated fully in the autoplugging yet though, so it currently needs to be manually added to the playback pipelines.

  2. Great news. I’ll happily switch to the GStreamer backend when this stuff hits my distribution.

    Thanks Jan & Sebastian :-)

  3. Bluray is at this moment practically impossible. The decryption of the streams can not be done real time. Oh, the codecs exist already, it’s just that the DRM is more serious.

  4. Since I know I won’t be able to read them, I am not buying Bluray (too expensive anyway compared to VoD or DVD). Their loss (given the bad sales, il seems they do start to care ;) ) …

  5. Finally! :) I will test my DVD collection somewhere this week.

    Thanks for the great work!

  6. I just want to chime in and say this is potentially the best news I’ve heard in ages.

Comments are closed.