FC5 extras/ FC6: update to Xine removes support for DVD playback

 in Linux / Open Source / Video  tagged Fedora / livna / rpm / yum (updated 6542 days ago)

I just did an update on my FC5 boxes and found that FC5 Extras will update Xine in a way that removes functionality that was there previously.  This includes the ability to play DVDs.  I’m not sure the reasoning, though I think it has something to do with removing "non-free" portions.  The definition of non-free always seems to be subjective in cases like this, so I won’t offer an opinion if this was right or wrong.

However, I’d still like to watch my DVDs (actually, I just listen to most of them while I work on other projects).

To get around this issue, you need to do the following:

  • Remove xine and xine-lib:  sudo yum remove xine xine-lib
  • Make sure you’ve got both the Dries and Livna repositories installed.
  • Install xine-lib from the Dries repository:  sudo yum install xine-lib  (the repository listed should be dries).

FYI:  The place where I found the best info on this problem is on the FedoraForums site.

Dependencies Resolved
==================================================
 Package                 Arch       Version          Repository        Size
=================================================
Installing:
 xine-lib                i386       1.1.2-2.fc5.rf   dries             4.0 M

  • Install xine from Livna: sudo yum install xine (the repository listed should be livna).

Dependencies Resolved
====================================================
 Package                 Arch       Version          Repository        Size
====================================================
Installing:
 xine                    i386       0.99.4-8.lvn5    livna             1.6 M

Update:  2007-01-22

This fixed most of the problems I had, but for some reason I still had one machine that wouldn’t play any DVD all the way through.  They would all stop about 1/2 way through.  On those DVDs, Xine didn’t work at all but MPlayer would play about 1/2 and then stop. 

After digging around I found lots of references to having the wrong region code set for my DVD player.  I tdidn’t think that was the issue, but I downloaded regionset for FC5 and reset the region code to 1 for the US.  But that wasn’t really the problem.  The real problem was that the DVD drive was /dev/hda and it was being accessed via the scsi drivers incorrectly.   The way to fix it was to add hda=ide-cd to my kernel boot arguments in /etc/grub.conf.

Now all my DVDs play correctly.