MPlayer Hangs When Trying to Open a DVD

[linuxuser40351]

I have recently customized and set up Mandriva 2005 on my dual hard drives (root partition=20 GB and /home=80 GB). Anyway, I have ran into a problem that I've never had before. I have installed all of the uprmi packages, have installed win32-codecs and libdvdcss2 and when I try to play a DVD the drive spins up and down and mplayer hangs and I have to use the gnome monitor to kill it as well as eject the dvd. All other movies play fine. I have never had this problem before, but also I had never installed the mplayer skins and things either. Does anybody know of a part of mplayer that causes a conflict or something that results in this?

[fingal]

Hello - Not sure how helpful this is, but I've always had problems running Mplayer in graphical mode. It might be useful to start it in a terminal - I can't remember the exact command for a graphical startup - to see if it spews out any error messages.

I've always compromised with Mplayer and compiled it from source ... then I run it from Konsole (or whatever terminal you use in Gnome). I compile it with cpu runtime detection enabled ... Sometimes that can be the issue: if you are using a pre-compiled binary version of Mplayer it can completely fail to work (at least on my box). There are quite a few compile options that no-one tells you about, and the manual ... How long do you have to read that?? I believe the package works better without a gui.

A few years down the road I prefer to use Xine, Totem and Kaffeine. Mplayer is fine. A great package and everything but IMHO - like its developers - it has funny ideas and is a cow to use at times.

[linuxuser40351]

It was something with mplayer, I installed the xine-ui and it works perfect. I left the mplayer mozilla plugin though because it gives me play and stop options unlike the vlc plugin does.

[jazzyjerome]

I had to use that same solution.