Media players

I tried to play a DVD on my powerbook yesterday. This, of course, requires a decent media player; so I tried a few of them

ogle

Works; however, it has some issues which may be related to endianness problems, as the menu isn't displayed properly. Not enough so that I couldn't enjoy a movie with it, but enough so that I wanted to check out other media players. Also, at first I didn't notice the ogle-altivec package; without this package, even the movie isn't displayed properly (which suggests that ogle will give priority to sound rather than display, which is the best thing to do, as issues with sound are far better noticeable)

vlc

Has performance issues: the sound isn't updated fast enough, which is heavily annoying. On top of that, it does some weird stuff with the sound, too -- sounds like it adjusts its internal clock if it can't keep up. That is ugly. The streaming features, however, are nice enough so that I'll keep it for less resource-requiring media files (audio only stuff, small avi or mpg files, whatever)

Xine

Idem. I think its performance is slightly better than vlc, but it's still annoying. Xine doesn't have any other killer feature that I would like to have, so off it goes.

gstreamer0.8-dvd

The package name (and its dependencies) suggest gstreamer is able to play a dvd; however, I couldn't even find out how the bloody thing works. I also couldn't find any frontend which allowed me to play a DVD

The only other media player I know of is mplayer. At first, it didn't compile; but when I found that the problem was in the altivec-specific optimization code (altivec is some multimedia extension for PowerPC, a bit like MMX and SSE on intel), I ran configure again, and compiled mplayer without the altivec bits. It still plays a DVD without performance issues; so it beats the first three of the above players with its pants down.

I didn't find any other media players (the above is what apt-cache rdepends libdvdread3 came up with), but if someone can point me at one I forgot, a pointer is of course welcome.

Personally, I think we have a problem there. All media players that I know of have issues; if not with performance or with usability, there is an issue with the license. I hate this.

Oh well. Of the media players that are in the archive, it seems ogle is the best. With the altivec support package, it works almost perfectly (I can live with the issues in the menu); and even if there are performance issues, ogle will do the right thing: other than the other two, it will give priority to sound rather than display. Which is good, because distorted sound is immediately noticeable, whereas a distorted image is not