Xine willl not play VCD's

[camorri]

I am running Mandiva 2007.1. I have xine installed, 0.99.4. I installed it using URPMI and saw no problems during install. I can play audio CD's and radio streams from the internet with Xine.

 

I burned the VCD's using Nero on windows. The VCD's play on my DVD player without issue, so as far as I can tell, the CD's are in good condition, and were burned correctly.

The CD's are slide shows, of stills taken on my Nikon digital camera.

 

I have played with the setup, without finding any solution. If I click the VCD play button on Xine, I see the CD light flash, and then I see a lot of disk activity, that will last up to 5 minutes. Eventually xine crashes. Uaually I do a Ctrl Alt Backspace to kill KDE to recover the system.

 

Is there a log for Xine or should I look in a system log some where to look for error information? I ran it from a konsole, but I don't get any errors, or clues why the VCD fails to play.

 

Is there something I have not installed I may need to play a slide show VCD? According to the documentation on Xinehq, Xine should play a VCD. I also tried a SVCD burned on Nero, that didn't work either. ( I'm far less concerned with the SVCD right now. )

 

As a side light, I have spent a ton of time trying to figure out how to create a side show VCD in linux. I have a few ideas, but this does not appear to be an easy one to solve. Right now I'm trying Tovid to see if it can do the job. The objective is to get rid of one last thing I use windoze for.

[{BBI}Nexus{BBI}]

Have you tried a regular commercial vcd? Maybe it only has problems playing your 'home brew'

[camorri]

Have you tried a regular commercial vcd? Maybe it only has problems playing your 'home brew'

Interesting thought, I'm not sure where I would get a commercially available VCD. I spent a lot of time trying to find out if any one else has had success using Nero to burn a VCD of stills. But there is little information available.

 

I found some threads saying EasyVCD is a good program to burn a VCD. I have installed it, and I'm going to try it; as soon as I have time to figure that program out. Then I'll have another thing to compare to; not just a Nero burned VCD.

[scarecrow]

Nero's VCD's are pure crap- I can assure you.

EasyVCD used to work great, but I can't confirm if it sold anymore, since I have stopped burning VCD's since ages.

Still, I can play fine almost all of the VCD's that are distributed here via newspapers (they are regular VCD's, and not sllideshow stuff). They play fine in Kaffeine (which is a xine frontend), Smplayer (which uses mplayer as a backend), and the latest usable VLC build (todays VLC nigthly source tarball builds fine for me, and it also seems to work quite well).

[camorri]

Scarcrow,

 

Thank-you for the reply. I have come to the same conclusion on Nero. EasyVCD is available as a try now, pay later download.

 

I have spent some time trying to use DVD-Slidshow. I can produce a file on disk that I can play in Xine. I just have not figured out how to burn the correct stuff to a VCD, so I can put it in the DVD palyer attached to the TV. There are examples how to do it for a DVD, but not a VCD. Hmmmm. It may be time to break down, upgrade the system and get a DVD burner...

[camorri]

I gave up on EasyVcd. It seems they will allow you to produce only a 5 slide show without buying their package.

 

I have installed ToVid and gave that a try. I took the file I produced with DVD-slideshow and used it with ToVid and produced a playable VCD. It played on my Sony DVD player.

 

Strange thing, it will not play in Xine. Xine closes as soon as it starts to play. Hmmmm.

 

I was able to create a title page with background music. It is a slide show of about 50 slides. I will try and produce some more working VCD/s to see what I can do.

[camorri]

Some months later, and a new machine. I'm updating this, just incase someone else goes down this road.

 

I have new hardware, now running Mandriva 2008 ( 32 bit free edition ). The system is a AMD 64 bit system. I now have a DVD burner. B)

 

O.K. If you want to create a slide show in linux that shoudl play on any decent DVD player. Here is the software I'm using. Can't tell you what other options might be out there.

 

I installed two main packages, DVD-Slideshow and ToVid. Both have their own web sites with support. DVD-Slideshow is a collection of scripts, and bin executables. I used URPMI to install them so I had all the pre-req's.

 

With dir2slideshow ( comes with DVD-slideshow ) you create a txt file for input to DVD-slideshow. Easy command line tool to use. Read the man page, everything I needed was there. Then I used dvd-slideshow to creage a .vob file. This is a file you can play with mplayer or xine. Once you have several ( or just one ) .vob file, you use ToVid to create the menu's and DVD. ( can also create VCD or SVCD's ).

 

I'm using K3b to burn the DVD ( VCD or SVCD ). Lots of options, menu's etc.

 

If anyone has a better way, don't hesitate to let us know.