MPlayer 040605 -- DVD Audio Commentary

[lakerdonald]

I know that MPlayer does not at this time support DVD menus, but I was wondering if you can listen to DVD Audio Commentary despite that. I read through all of the man pages and documentation, and the closest mention was Audio Channels. I played with that for awhile, and then realized that this wasn't what I was looking for. So if there is a way to listen to DVD Audio commentary, I would love to know how. I have Googled this, but I couldn't find anything useful and the man pages didn't mention it. Maybe there's something I missed?
-lakerdonald

[variant]

yes specify a different audio stream on the command line. failing that use xine or ogle which both have full dvd menu support.

[lakerdonald]

I figured it was a different audio stream but I looked on the dvd and there aren't any alternate sound files

[Dolda2000]

You can't really look for files on the DVD to find those things. Those DVD files are really tricky, and sometimes two tracks are merged into one file, sometimes it's the opposite and so on... DVDs suck, really...

You should run "mplayer -v dvd://" - that will make it list all the available audio stream IDs somewhere with a ton of other output... =/
Then, when you find the ID you want, choose it with -aid.

[lakerdonald]

thanks
didn't think of mr. handy dandy verbose!
-lakerdonald

[Dolda2000]

No, who would? =)

I mean, seriously, that's yet one of the large faults of MPlayer. Whoever would think of turning on verbose logging to find out what substreams there are?

I have to say, I really look forward to the day that gstreamer reaches full maturity.

[lakerdonald]

maybe i should email them and have them add it to the documentation or something...

[Dolda2000]

Well, it does say in the manpage under the -aid option, but the problems that I see is:
1. It's not really very intuitive.
2. You have to find it in the manpage, which is vast.
3. It's very hard to do automatic parsing of it (say I wanted to write a script that always finds the Japanese audio stream in anime OGM encodings, for example... that's not easy)

[lakerdonald]

mplayer also has a very bad habit of ruining the A/V sync when you have subtitles on. I've tried all the autosync options plus audio and subtitle delay but it still throws it off. i guess i'll have to continue teaching myself nihongo, but until then i must listen to the redneck voice of kitsune in love hina in english! noooo!!!!
-lakerdonald

[Dolda2000]

I will not allow you to watch dubbed anime! It's sacrilege (especially a masterpiece like Love Hina)! If I have to, I will crack your computer and remove all your English anime files. ;-)

I've never noticed that MPlayer ruins that A/V sync when you have subtitles. What kind of encoding are you trying to watch? OGM? If it really is the fault of the subtitles, you may want to consider an encoding where you have to subtitles encoded into the video stream, as is the custom for eg. AVI files.
Is it DVD subtitles you are referring to, by any chance?