How to watch a DVD movie on DSL

Forum: Other Help Topics
Topic: How to watch a DVD movie on DSL
started by: WarpedPoodle

Posted by WarpedPoodle on April 04 2006,23:24

I am new to DSL and find it very exciting.

I am booting DSL from CD on a DELL Inspirion laptop that only has a DVD drive. It boots and sound works well.

Is it possible to remove the DSL CD once the system is booted and put a DVD movie in and watch it in Linux?

I tried to eject the CD and it would not come out. Does it need to stay in because I booted from it or does DSL load itself all into memory?

Thanks for your help.

Posted by mikshaw on April 05 2006,00:45

If you boot with the "dsl toram" option (type it in when you recieve the "boot:" prompt) it will load DSL into ram and allow you access to the drive. Otherwise you cannot use the drive, since it is being used to hold the KNOPPIX image.

Another option is to try running a frugal/poorman's harddrive installation, which behaves the same as a liveCD but runs from the harddrive instead of a cdrom.

Posted by WarpedPoodle on April 05 2006,02:01

Thanks for your reply, I will try the toram option.

Please tell me, what is the application bundled with dsl that will show the DVD movie for me? What do I use to view it in?

Posted by mikshaw on April 05 2006,03:36

There is no app bundled with DSL that will play DVDs. You can play them with mplayer or xine, available from the mydsl repository. If it's an encrypted DVD (most commercial DVDs in US are) you might need to add libdvdcss.