Best PND for dvd playback?

[sepp256]

Can anyone suggest the best way for me to play DVD's on the pandora? I tried using SMPlayer2 to play a DVD from a USB thumb drive, and the playback seemed to hang.


Has anyone had success playing DVD's from either a USB drive or SD card on their pandora? If not, what player/video encoding do you recommend for movie viewing on pandora?

 

[younghifi]

Playing "DVD's from a USB drive/SD card"? Sounds a bit wrong. DVD discs usually need DVD drives


What do you have? A ripped DVD movie as VOB files or image/iso files of a DVD disc?

 

[sepp256]

Yes, ripped DVD movie as VOB files. I'd like to just rip DVD's and then watch on my pandora rather than transcode to h264 or divx or whatever.

 

[younghifi]

SMPlayer should be able to play MPG2/VOB files, although I haven't tried it myself.


Be sure to have the codec pack installed too.

 

[relliker]

My 1st preference would be VLC as it plays almost anything and there's versions for windows and mac too, but SMPlayer is good too.

 

[captain_coconut]

Can anyone suggest the best way for me to play DVD's on the pandora? I tried using SMPlayer2 to play a DVD from a USB thumb drive, and the playback seemed to hang.


Has anyone had success playing DVD's from either a USB drive or SD card on their pandora? If not, what player/video encoding do you recommend for movie viewing on pandora?

I do this frequently and have not encountered any issues playing back DVD rips with SMPlayer2. It has also been reported that DVD playback works fine from an external USB dvd drive. Is it possible there is a problem with the rip itself? What program are you using to do the DVD rip? Unfortunately I have encountered a few DVDs that I have been unable to rip properly using free open source tools, and had to resort to using a Windows tools called DVDFab which works quite well.


Are you using the option File -> Open DVD from Folder? - You don't want to open the VOB files directly.


If you could test out the rip with a PC build of mplayer or other players and report if it hangs there as well that would be useful. Use a command like the following:


mplayer -nocache -dvd-device /path/to/VIDEO_TS dvdnav://


or


mplayer -dvd-device /path/to/VIDEO_TS dvd://1


If you want to reencode a DVD to save space this is a recipe I have found works reliably and gives good quality. I am running Debian Linux but this should apply to any flavor of Linux.


1. Use DVDFab under wine to do the initial rip to a subdirectory on the hard drive.


2. Use h264enc to generate a h264 encode with AAC audio in a mkv container. I use a two pass encode with extreme high quality settings. When prompted I leave most things as defaults but you should pay attention to things like cropping appropriately and if the DVD is interlaced or hard telecined.


3. Play back with SMPlayer2

 

[captain_coconut]

My 1st preference would be VLC as it plays almost anything and there's versions for windows and mac too, but SMPlayer is good too.

Agreed that VLC is an excellent player but it suffers from tearing on the Pandora ( at least the versions I tried. )

 

[PowerGod]

Are there already some players that uses NEON (if I understood correctly what NEON is...) or the DSP ?

 

[sebt3]

Are there already some players that uses NEON (if I understood correctly what NEON is...) or the DSP ?

No DSP usage for now.


The NEON is the fpu (floating point unit). Think it as a math co-processor. Most (if not all) apps use it. But they do it poorly. As Exophase explained many times, the compiler does a poor job using the DSP producing sub-obtimal program.


If you realy want to use it fully, you need to use it by hand which requiere Exophase level of coding...

 

[PowerGod]

Thanks for the explanation