I'm adding an ebuild for libbluray to the gentoo multimedia overlay if someone wants to access it.  It's something I plan on pushing into the mainline tree soon enough, once it's properly finished.

If you are building MPlayer from SVN, it will automatically detect the new library, and build against it.  You can use the -9999 ebuild in the portage tree.

To playback some of your Blu-Ray content, you will first need to extract it to your harddrive.  I use MakeMKV, also in the multimedia overlay, to accomplish that.

Here's a simple way using the CLI to dump the contents:

$ makemkvcon backup --decrypt disc:/mnt/bluray/ <location to dump content>

The syntax for playback is:

$ mplayer br:// -bluray-device <path to dumped content>

By default, it will play the longest playlist (I think).  If you can get the list of playlists available, you can pass that as an optional parameter to br:// (fex: list_titles /home/steve/bluray/src; mplayer br://5 -bluray-device /home/steve/bluray/src).

libbluray also ships with a few example programs that do basic stuff like listing the titles (list_titles), dumping information about the playlists (mpls_dump), and a few more (sound_dump, index_dump, mobj_dump, libbluray_test, bdsplice, clpi_dump).

Have fun with it.

I haven't found a way to embed this in my browser yet, but I haven't really looked either, so this is for all the CLI geeks.

$ mplayer $(youtube-dl -b -g http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9IfEInQ7aic)

And thar ya go.

Oh, and did you know that Flash Gordon is on Blu-Ray now?  Flash!  Aaaaaa-ah!

I found a few bugs in my ripper this weekend, one of them was that I was only storing one possible subtitle type in my Matroska rips.  If a DVD had both VobSub and Closed Captioning, it'd only mux the first one I added.  Fixing it was fun, since it was one of those moments where you open up the code trying to find the reason for it, and you find a big comment labeled "FIXME: Add this feature here."  Heh.  So, now it muxes both, if available.  Woots.

There is still one DVD subtitle format that I am having absolutely zero luck in finding anything about -- English SDH (Subtitled for the Deaf and Hard of hearing).  According to Wikipedia, it's basically closed captioning with color.  I can play / watch / rip closed captioning just fine (watching: mplayer -subcc dvd://, ripping: ccextractor), but not SDH.  And I haven't seen anything that can even play them yet, although in fairness I've only been playing with Linux applications.  And everytime I try to explain to someone what I'm trying to do, they think I'm talking about VobSub subtitles.  Usually I get tired of trying to explain the difference and give up searching.  I could try finding some Windows apps to rip / play them, but if I can't get something in Linux that's scriptable to access them, then it doesn't matter anyway.  So, if someone knows of something ... plz to drop me a line, kthx.

Speaking of subtitles and MPlayer, I've come to the conclusion that MPlayer's support for them is just plain sub-par.  The options to play them back (or force them off) are buggy and inconsistent across the bar.  For example, here's a small roundup:

- Flagging a subtitle track as "default" when muxing a Matroska stream means that, if you turn on subtitles in the viewer, that should be the first one to show up.  It does not mean "these are forced subtitles, so display them automatically."  That's why Matroska has a "forced" tag.  default != forced.  If you're still lost, look at the original audio and video tracks, and you'll see they are also muxed with the "default" flag fipped on.  It's purpose makes more sense with video with multiple audio tracks -- if there's more than one, which one do you play by default?  The one with the "default" flag!  Same principle should apply with subtitles when you turn them on.

- MPlayer can't load Matroska subtitles externally.  You can, if you wish, mux just subtitle streams into a Matroska wrapper (ex: mkvmerge subtitles.{idx,srt} -o subtitles.mks).  But using "mplayer -sub subtitles.mks" won't work.  Bummer.   I understand that in this case, the Matroska stream could contain more than one subtitle stream (VobSubs and CC in my example), and it generally expects just one (-sub subtitles.idx, fex), but still, it'd be a fancy feature.

- MPlayer can't dump CC to SRT, even though it can play them (mplayer -subcc).  Bummer.

- Random rant about -noforcedsub and -nosub and -sub are conflicting / confusing, but too lazy to put together data about it, and it's mostly related to the Matroska one above.

I just had to get that stuff off my chest.   I have faith in MPlayer eventually improving in said areas, and filing bugs would probably be good on my part.  I generally don't deal with subtitles much anyway, so for me it's kind of a "would be nice to have" set of features.  Meaning, I've already worked around the bugs and they don't bother me as much anymore.  I would be curious to get SDH read support though.

I'm starting to notice a general trend here -- I complain a lot about certain issues and bugs in detail, but never go out of my way to report them.  I'm becoming the kind of user that as a developer I totally hate!  Oh noes!

In reality, I like being able to be on both sides of the coin, and I'd have to agree with the assessment of most user complaints I see, that are: the barrier to entry to reporting bugs is too hard.  I could go into detail about that, but I don't really want to, as I don't wanna focus on the negative.  But generally speaking, sometimes it's too much of a hassle to easily report a bug.  If it means me creating yet another user account on a bug tracker or subscribing to a mailing list, I weigh that against the strain of just ignoring or working around the bug.

I am, of course, to blame for my laziness, and I completely understand that developers (such as myself) need a detailed report with contact information along with the ability to quickly index reports.  I wonder if there's some magical middle ground, though, where users who aren't regular bug reporters can just easily report their issues and be on their way.  I know in Gentoo, we tend to use the forums as a poor-man's bugzilla sometimes, and maybe that's one way to do it.  Interesting stuff to think about.  Drive-by bug reporters, kinda thing.  They'll come by once or twice, but not regularly.

Anyway, I can't think of any other interesting DVD stuff I ran into this weekend.  Other than I bought season three of Taxi and it wasn't as entertaining as I remembered it to be.  Oh well.  You win some, you lose some.

The simplest way I'm dealing with it now is just rip the DVD and use MPlayer to play it back correctly. I only need a few switches, and I'm done.

There's two ways to deal with it. The first, I just crop it myself with this:

$ mplayer -vf crop=704:352:8:64

Here's a before:

and the after:

You can't tell from these since I had to rescale them for the blog, but the second one was slightly less narrow than the first by a few pixels. Can be a bit of an annoyance.

The second way is much simpler.

If you're playing back on a widescreen monitor, just do this:

$ mplayer -panscan 1 -aspect 4:3

And it will frame it perfectly.

The coolest thing is that two of my patches got submitted upstream, one for mplayer, and one for ffmpeg.  In both cases, they needed to be changed a bit, but I'm still happy with the results.  The ffmpeg one was the patch I wrote about previously, to have the LAVF demuxer pull out all the metadata that's in the Matroska container.  That's in there as of revision 19184.  Thanks, aurel.

There's no way currently of cleanly pulling it out of MPlayer for display, though my hack works just fine.  The demuxer for mplayer needs a new function to iterate through all the metadata that's available, and add it to the demuxer info.  Currently, it's only pulling out a few named keys specifically.

Here's a screenshot of how it looks where I'm pulling it out, in this case I'm just using it as an OSD menu screen display.

The actual documentation on how to access the OSD menus and work them is pretty non-existent.  I'll try and write some up and get it submitted when I get a chance.  In the meantime, if you want to see what my menu configuration looks like, have at it.  I haven't cleaned it up at all.

I'm too tired to lay this down in story format, so I'm just gonna dump it out best I can.

The other week, I noticed that a new version of mkvtoolnix had come out (the tool to mux audio/video files into the Matroska container), and it totally flew under my radar. I started playing with it, and noticed some real improvements in speed, with regards to parsing MPEG-2 video. After playing around a bit, I started reading some more of the documentation, and found out about this excellent tagging system that the specification declares.

You can read all the gory details about it here, but basically, when building a Matroska file, you can create an XML file that has global tags that can store pretty much every metadata tag I could ever dream of possibly wanting.

I never really had the itch to pack much metadata into the container up until this time, when I realized just how much factual data I could stuff in there and not depend on the database for. Pretty much the only thing I really cared about was the title. In fact, all I wanted originally was to be able to get MPlayer to display the metadata title that was in the file.

Going off on a tangent here, I poked an open bug I have on MPlayer's bugzilla, and Reimar, an mplayer dev, was kind enough to oblige me once more and updated the code so that I could pull it out. If you're using a recent snapshot (for Gentoo, the 20090530 one has it), you can pull it out using "get_property metadata/title" in slave mode. If you wanted to display it on-screen, you would map a keypress event or LIRC event to this: osd_show_property_text "${metadata/title}". Quotes and all.

Anyway, Reimar added that in for me (thanks, man), so I started poking around with mplayer's features to see what else it could pull out for me. Now that I was going to be storing lots more data in the container, I wanted to be able to pull it out, too.

Jump forward a bit to today, where I woke up this morning and was determined to get it out somehow. My original plan that I had decided on was, since I can't really hack on C code, to just work around the limitation by using a fifo for mplayer. I'll spare you the ugly details, but basically I was going to have an event send a command to an external script that would query the .mkv file for the metadata tag I requested, and send a command back through the pipe to print that out to the screen. Quite a run around.

Well, I've tried before to grep the code of mplayer a bit to see if I could wrap my head around the stuff and see if I could figure it out for myself, but it hasn't worked out real well. I decided to give it another whirl today, though. This time, however, my approach was a little bit different. Normally I would just search for keywords where I *think* mplayer would be doing what I would think it was doing, tinker with the code, recompile it, run it, and see what it does. A really slow process, but sometimes it works. And I really don't mind spending the time on it, either.

This time, I did things a little bit differently. I found a file where I was sure that it was accessing matroska metadata, and I read the entire thing, and took copious notes, explaining to myself the whole time, basically what I thought the purpose of each major element was, trying to figure out the pattern to this. Now, bear in mind, that I'm still learning some C++ myself, and the C syntax is pretty similar (in fact ... I still can hardly tell the difference, myself), so a lot of times I have a vague understanding of what it *might* be doing, but never enough to be sure ... so there is still a lot of guesswork involved.

Anyway, after about 10 hours of going back and forth, making notes, testing code, printing out functions and variables and metadata, I got it figured out. And the final patch is something like 2 lines long, heh. All I did was add one if statement. But, that was enough to get me going, and it solved a nagging issue for me. But, what is far more valuable, is the fact that I've learned how I can go into this code and figure out how to fix things myself. That's gonna really come in handy. I'm sure I won't be submitting patches upstream anytime soon, but if I can get what I want hacked in there, and working, I'll be happy as a clam.

For the record, the problem with the metadata was this: MPlayer has a single key=value pair that it assigns to metadata values with it is parsing it with the libavformat demuxer. That is normally well and good, except in the case of Matroska, the tags can be nested with similar names.

So, for example, say you have two target tags in your matroska container: Collection and Episode. If it were a TV show, let's say it's CHiPs. Great show, btw. Now, in the tagging specification, both of them can have a title. The title for the collection would be CHiPs. If you had a Matroska A/V file that was just one episode, then the title for that would be "Ponch Delivers A Baby on the Disco Floor" or whatever (which really does happen, I kid you not). They key for both of those would be "title", but the values would be different. The LAVF demuxer just overwrites the old value and assigns it to whatever comes last. Kind of a problem.

So all I did was told the demuxer to prefix the key names with whatever the name of the target tag was (Collection, Season, Episode, etc.). That way you can have distinct key value pairs, but they are just more verbose. The metadata property names now are metadata/collection/title instead of metadata/title. Pretty simple, really.

That was the easy part. The second part, I haven't figured out yet -- how to get it out. The metadata is all in a separate object created by the LAVF demuxer, which I don't know enough C to figure out how to access that outside of that class. So, I just hacked it to add it to the metadata myself in a rather ugly, but working fashion. Upstream probably wouldn't be interested in that patch.

Another hard day's work, and I'm still not done. And I've got a lot more to write about it, so I'll just stop here for now. I'm gonna go port the patches to my frontends.

Edit: For reference, the clean version of the patch, a sample XML file of what I would mux in with an episode, and the ugly hack I personally am using to get it all out where my lack of C knowledge is very much publicly exposed.  Note that you have to use -demuxer lavf with mplayer for it to work.

I just added a new ebuild to the tree this week for MPlayer, which has support for the much talked about VDPAU which comes with nvidia video cards and binary drivers.  If you don't know what that is, it is probably most simply described as XvMC for more codecs: MPEG1, MPEG2, MPEG4 (H264), WMV, VC1.  The player offloads a lot of CPU decoding to the video card instead of your processor, meaning cheap video cards and cheap computers can playback HD without any hiccups.

In theory, at least.  I don't know how well it works since I haven't been able to test it much, and whenever I do, I can't get it under 50% CPU anyway.

Anyway, you are free to try it of course.  The latest mplayer ebuild is 20090226.28734.  The naming scheme changed to reflect both the release date of the snapshot (Feb 26 2009) and the SVN revision from upstream (28734).  There is a "vdpau" use flag you'll need to enable on the ebuild, and you'll need  v180.22 or higher of nvidia-drivers.  In this case, nvidia is releasing updates with new drivers, so the more recent the better.

Here's some cool stuff to read about VDPAU and what it can do:

NVIDIA 180.35 Driver Update Brings Changes

HD Video Playback With A $20 CPU & $30 GPU On Linux

Wikipedia entry

MythTV Wiki: Supported Cards

nvnews forum thread: mplayer and vdpau - see the third post for samples to test and mplayer command lines.

Oh yes, using it is pretty much a matter of mplayer -vo vdpau foo.wmv.  You may or may not need to use the -vc argument.  I haven't looked closely.  See "mplayer -vc help | grep vdpau" for a reference, or the man page.

As far as the mplayer ebuild goes, there have been a lot of changes.  I'd been queuing them up for a good while waiting to push them live.  I had hoped to have a finished document accompany the release, but I haven't given much time to it, and since VDPAU came out, I figured it would be better to release the ebuild.

It's currently masked, but won't be for long.  One nice thing it does is it splits up the real use flag into two: real and realcodecs.  I found that some users were confused and thought that they had to enable the realcodecs use flag to get any support for real codec playback, but that was never the case, as libavcodec always had support for some.  Now, the real flag will enable the internal support, and realcodecs will still use the external binary ones (not recommended).

Also, since libdvdnav got accepted into the mainstream build, we no longer have to rely on a masked, external dependency, so the dvdnav use flag is unmasked, available, and enabled by default.  You can playback DVDs browsing the navigation menus by using mplayer dvdnav:// instead of mplayer dvd://.

Other use flags that were added were faac, faad, and tremor.  If you want native support for AAC playback, just enable the aac use flag.  If you want to use the external libraries instead (faac and faad), then just disable the aac use flag and enable the other ones.  Tremor is the internal support for Vorbis playback.

The last change to the ebuild is that now lots more use flags are enabled by default.  I found out that a lot of people were going in #mplayer complaining that their builds weren't working when really it was just not compiled with much in it.  As a result, I've changed it so it will enable just about every internal library and external codec.  That should make things simpler for users who want things to "just work" out of the box.

That's it for now.  I'll be bumping the ebuild again, soon, and regularly as long as the VDPAU development in mplayer keeps moving at a hectic pace.

The issue I run into with my TV shows is that sometimes I need to use different deinterlacing filters or different audio delays for different series. It would be a pain to create a config file for each individual file, so this patch fits the bill. If you just use -use-dir-conf, it will look for an mplayer.conf file in the existing directory, and include that.

Pretty simple, really. I hope I wrote the patch right, since I'm no master of C. I just copied the old functionality, dropped what it didn't look like was relevant and removed unused variables. And hey, works for me.

Patches cleanly against latest SVN (28348).

Edit: Well, crap, I just realized that it only works if you have mplayer.conf in the same directory as you are running mplayer from .... so doing mplayer -use-dir-conf /foo/movie.mp4 wouldn't work if you're not in /foo. Unlike -use-filedir-conf, you can't call it from some other directory. Someone wanna help me out?

RV40 was added in the previous one. Thanks, Kostya.

For some samples, see:

http://samples.mplayerhq.hu/real/VC-RV30/

http://samples.mplayerhq.hu/real/VC-RV40/

Have fun watching those old Paula Abdul videos.

There has only been a small change -- the script will check mplayer's exit code to see if it died on something.  I added it since I hit a bug on my frontend where some files wouldn't resume, and it would delete my resume point anyway.  Kind of annoying.  This update fixes that, and really, that's it.

The use flag is masked, so you'll have to unmask it to use it, but if you do it will pull in the forked libdvdnav and libdvdread as a dependency.  After that, you can use mplayer dvdnav:// to get funky, sexy menus when watching DVDs.  Whee!

Here's how to unmask a use flag:

mkdir -p /etc/portage/profile/

echo media-video/mplayer -dvdnav >> /etc/portage/profile/package.use.mask

Then just set enable the dvdnav use flag for the package as normal.  Personally, I like flagedit.

flagedit media-video/mplayer dvdnav

I've been busy masking realplayer support in portage due to issues, but libavcodec now has it's own native decoder for RealVideo 4 (RV40).  Thanks, Kostya.

Read about it here:

• RV40 Is In
• Baby Got RV40

Mike summarized it pretty well on his blog post:

"Also, do you dare ask why this is useful in the grand scheme of multimedia hacking? Seriously? Have you not learned by now? While it may be true that absolutely no one likes Real or their formats, there is still a huge legacy of media in the wild encoded in their formats, media that will need to be manipulated for many years to come."

One other thing that got fixed in MPlayer that naturally only I and very few others are going to care about, is that mplayer dumpstream now supports ending chapters again.  It was removed a while back and readded recently.  It was pretty much the only reason the 1.0_rc2_p24929-r4 ebuild is still in the tree.  A specific example would be that you can do something like this: mplayer dvd:// -dumpstream -dumpfile movie.vob -chapter 2-5

Seems like there was something else that changed.  Can't remember now, oh well.

Here's a few things I want to remember as a point of reference, that took me a bit of research to figure out:

Printing options in MPlayer:

mplayer -list-options <command line arguments>

mplayer -input cmdlist <slave mode commands>

mplayer -input keylist <events>

Mapping Page Up and Page Down with my remote in MythTV:

begin
prog = mythtv
button = ch+
repeat = 3
config = PgUp
end

begin
prog = mythtv
button = ch-
repeat = 3
config = PgDown
end

Finally, I hit some snag with MPlayer and VobSubs (subtitles that originally come with DVDs).  I've got some movies in Matroska format, and with recent (SVN r27719) revisions, it will forcibly display the subtitles on playback, and I have no idea why.  I swear I remember reading something about this on the mailing list a while ago, but I haven't had much luck finding anything.  Best option so far, go back to an earlier revision (r25993).  Not ideal, but it works.  Every sub, force and vobsub option I've tried does nothing.  I'm not passing anything by default like -slang or -sid to mplayer.

Another thing I've been working on (I'm really bored) is finding posters for the cover images in my movies folder.  Which got me looking at UK quad posters.  If you haven't ever seen the posters from across the pond, they are so much better than our American counterparts.  They are a horizontal landscape, which allows for, in my opinion, a much more dramatic picture.  Check out this Star Wars one, for example.

It just looks so much better, in my opinion.  I gotta get some movie posters up on my wall (only two so far: Tron and The Adventures of Milo in the Phantom Tollbooth), and I'd love to hunt down some quads.  The old school Disney ones look even awesomer.

Speaking of cover images for Myth, I have a new patch I cranked out last night, which has an interesting story to it.  I'll post details later, though.  I'm not in the mood for details right now.  I'm more about hunting down stupid bugs that don't require too much brain power.

My overlay isn't in layman right now, so if you want to check it out, here's the skinny:

svn co http://overlays.gentoo.org/svn/dev/beandog/

Have fun and lemme know if there's any problems.

First of all, mplayer. The latest revision is 1.0_rc2_p27120. The snapshot itself is about a month old, and I don't know of anything particularly major that's in there (I haven't had time to follow development for the past month anyway). It's been masked for testing, not because upstream has done anything funky, but because there are some new use flags, which have helped me to go back and clean up some stuff that I should have done a long time ago. I haven't heard a peep from anyone on bugzilla so either no one's tried it, or it works great.

The big changes that I can think of off the top of my head are this: first of all, there's an ewarn added if you enable the cpudetection flag. It finally dawned on me that this one might not make sense. Here's what it *doesn't* do -- magically make the build detect and build for your CPU architecture. The build system already automatically detects and installs with the correct instruction set by default, using stuff like MMX, SSE, and friends. The only reason (that I can think of) that you would use that, is if you were deploying the binary package on another computer, since it is a runtime feature, not a buildtime one. So, you'll get a little warning if you enable it, because, in general, desktop users don't need it. I also fixed the use.local.desc to be a bit more specific as well.

Secondly, there's a new use flag: custom-cpuopts which should finally solve the long-standing dance of trying to outwit users who always break their system but still allow real tweakers to do exactly what they want. Here's how it works. MPlayer's build system, again, by default, will automatically detect the CPU optimizations that are supportd for your platform (MMX, SSE, again, etc.). That means that, again, if you leave everything by default -- it should work fine.

Originally the problem we would have is that people would have their CPU optimization use flags turned off (like mmx), which would normally break the build. The ebuild is written to only disable them if they are turned off, so my solution for a long time was to tell people to just turn them all on and let MPlayer *not* disable them, therefore, revert back to autodetection. This would then cause problems, though, for those few who were building MPlayer for some other box, and they wanted specific CPU opts on or off. This use flag will fix just that.

What custom-cpuopts will do, when enabled, is forcibly enable or disable the actual CPU optimization use flags you set. This will help out those on certain profiles and setups who need to tweak their build for whatever reason. For normal desktop users, you don't need to enable it -- if it's turned off, the ebuild will completely ignore the other use flags (for CPU optimizations) and just use the default checks ... which work great. It also means that your build will be optimized the best it can, yay!

I know I really went into depth on that one, but it's been an issue with the build and users for a long time and I'm glad I finally got a cleaner solution working. Now everyone has the options to do whatever they want, but by default, everything should build and be optimized wonderfully.

Oh yes, one last thing -- if someone wants to fix bug 228799, and submit a patch upstream, I'd be extremely grateful. That would clean up the LINGUAS hack in our ebuild, which I've heard breaks on paludis anyway.

As far as transcode -- I've been out of the loop, and the media-video team has been taking things over and cleaning up (I don't even know who, sorry guys, haven't taken the time to look into that either -- I know loki_val fixed up some imagemagick / ffmpeg dep crap that I didn't want to touch, thanks man!). 1.0.5 is back in the tree, and should be the next stable candidate. I also added another rc for 1.0.6, and I have to add the 1.10 beta sometime.

That's about it for now. Have fun. Go break your box.

I've mostly been cleaning up really small stuff, small bugfixes that have been annoying me for a while.

GPNL / Packages

For the packages website, I finally fixed it so that you can search by just package name again. It's still messed up where it searches way too much stuff by default, but that'll be fixed soon. It was originally searching by atom and description, so stuff like package$ would break.

I did, however, put the basic search I want to add to the packages website into GPNL: search by atom, package, category, description or all. I need to add changelog to that list. It's not much, I know, but it's a start on the long road to getting an advanced search going. I also cleaned up the front page a bit, and added a link to the nightly database dumps.

I also cleaned up the bash script to import the data. It actually has the beginnings of some error checking now, so you shouldn't be seeing blank pages anymore. And the database is vacuumed correctly, and on a regularly basis, so things should be slightly snappier. I'm also importing the entire portage tree 3x daily now instead of twice. The import script is actually a nice cleanup for me, because if something breaks, I can run parts of it partially, instead of having to manually fix it. It's much nicer.

My next big thing is getting RDEPEND searchable.  In the database, it's combined with the DEPEND variable, so I have to separate the two out.  Once that's done, we can finally dynamically query the tree to see where ebuilds need to be fixed for binary packages.

MPlayer / Transcode

Looking better, closed like eight bugs the other day for mplayer. Finally fixed some asinine bugs of mine for transcode, have one more to go.

Took out the masked libdvdnav because it will conflict and break libdvdread. I already wrote about how I put it in my overlay so if someone wants to use it, they can.

Sword ebuilds

I finally got pretty much all the main ones in the tree that I wanted to get in. There's still two LDS ones that I have to make myself. Shouldn't be too hard. I hope. In all, there are 150 sword ebuilds in the tree. Freak. That reminds me of something else I fixed on the packages website: it lists the number of results. That's something else that's been annoying me for a while.

I still need to remove the old sword-modules ebuild and add a new virtual-type one that will pull in all of the ones based on which language they are written in. Not hard to do, just slightly tedious. Should be done soon.

lds-scriptures 3.0

Believe it or not, I'm actually planning on getting this finished this week. The actual data has been finished for a very, very long time... it's writing the documentation that I am extremely particular about because I plan on this being the final release.

That's about it for now, that I can remember.

Generally speaking, I don't like the idea of ebuilds that hit upstream's SVN servers directly, so please be kind and don't do anything asinine like upgrade every single day or something.

So now I have live subversion ebuilds for both libdvdnav and mplayer.  This is the important thing to know about the libdvdnav ebuild: it has some changes to libdvdread so you will have to unmerge the one that is already uninstalled.  On top of that, since it is a new API version, everything you previously compiled against libdvdread (k3b, etc.) will have to be re-emerged ... and even then, there are zero guarantees that it will work at all.

In short, these ebuilds are only designed for a select few: those people who are using mplayer exclusively and want to have dvdnav support at the risk of breaking anything else that needs DVD access.  Obviously, that scenario fits for someone with a media frontend, but doesn't make sense for general desktop usage.

Also worth noting is that these are the only two ebuilds that will work together.  Previously, the mplayer in the tree would have detected and worked with the libdvdnav ebuild, but that's not the case anymore.  It's these two in the overlay, or the mplayer in the tree.  Pick one set and choose.

If you have problems with the ebuilds, let me know.  I'm still not an expert at layman so I can't go about giving you instructions on how to install this stuff directly.  Have fun, though.

Oh, and last but not least -- I tested them, and it works for me.   Just emerge libdvdread first, then mplayer.

If you just want simple playback support (no menu navigation), then use portage's tree. Just unmask and emerge media-libs/libdvdnav, then re-emerge media-video/mplayer. That will build against the older, original dvdread library, but it should be enough to get you around the Sony ARccOS DRM. Hint: mplayer dvdnav://[track_number]

If you want the full playback + navigation support, you're going to have to use an overlay (specifically, mine). I, personally, am against the idea of using overlays since I think it splits the tree, only asks for problems, and reminds me of using Mandrake back in the day when I had to have all these third-party mirrors just to get software I want. So, I'm really against the idea and wouldn't be doing this unless there were an easier, simpler way.

Ranting aside, my overlay is at http://overlays.gentoo.org/dev/beandog Browse the ebuilds here. I would give some slick instructions on how to add it using layman, but since I never use overlays, I can't tell you how, and I assume that the people who really know what they're doing don't need instructions anyway.

There are very few differences in my ebuilds. libdvdnav will use the newer version of libdvdread, so the one from the portage tree will show up as a blocker (and possibly break all your other packages that use it). After it's installed, you'll have to use my mplayer ebuild as well, since it's configured to use the external dvdread library as well. After that, you can use dvdnav:// as you normally would. Hint: mplayer dvdnav://

I know it's a bit of work, but until the forked libdvdnav can also work as a replacement or secondary slot to libdvdread in the tree, either option which would require testing, that's how its gotta be. The plus side though is, it works.

Not much to say, though, really ... there's a new snapshot in town (media-video/mplayer-1.0_rc2_p25993).  It fixes some security issues in older versions, which was the reason for the bump.  I've tried to change my approach of bumping the package every month or so and instead just focus on getting one release working really well and as many bugs fleshed out as possible in that release.  So far the approach has worked well.

Normally I'd have a good idea of what's changed between releases, but since I haven't had time to keep an eye on mplayer-dev either, I couldn't really say.  I think there's a few DVD fixes, but I'm not sure.  Sorry.

Anyway, as usual, let us know if you have any issues.  Should hit the tree shortly.  Enjoy.

The playlists thing is kind of hard to explain, and it'd be easier to point you to the documentation that I've already written.  Instead, I'll just describe what it is I'm going to use it for.

One thing I've been wanting to add to my MythVideo setup is some playlists so that I can randomly play something.  I have a lot of cartoons and videos and movies, and sometimes I don't feel like picking something myself -- one of the nice things about TV in general is you are genuinely surprised when you're channel surfing and something cool just happens to crop up.  That's kinda what I like, and what I wanted to do.  But, I wanted to take it a step further.  If I started playing $random_episode, then if I quit, I want to be able to resume playback of that same show.  Up until now, mplayer-resume wouldn't work that way, since if you're randomly picking something from a playlist file, there's no real way to seek back to the same one.

That's fixed now.  The script will read the filename of the movie you are playing when you exit (once you setup .lircrc correctly), and checks to see if that's the same file you started playing.  So if I play random.pls and it plays Tarzan.mkv, and I exit, then when I go back to watch Tarzan, it will resume in the same place.  Basically, it saves the file position for Tarzan instead of the playlist file.  Pretty cool.

So, there you go.  I'll put it in portage shortly as well.  Enjoy.