Howto: Enable DVD menus in MPlayer
A lot of distributions ship a binary of mplayer that is one, old, and two, doesn’t have the capability to see the menu of a dvd. The reason they ship an old binary of mplayer is because the developpers of mplayer don’t believe in releases. The “latest” release dates of October 2007. Yup that’s more than a year ago. What the developpers do believe in, is svn. Every change they make is just put in svn and that’s where you’ll get a recent version of mplayer.
First we need a recent version of dvdread and dvdnav, two libraries that allow us to view and navigate through dvd menus. We start with dvdread. Again, you will probably have a very old version of dvdread, so we get a recent version. Dvdread depends on libdvdcss so make sure you have it. You will also need the tools to compile from source of course.
1. Get the source:
wget http://www7.mplayerhq.hu/MPlayer/releases/dvdnav/libdvdread-4.1.3.tar.bz2
2. Unpack it and navigate to the directory:
tar xvfj libdvdread-4.1.3.tar.bz2
cd libdvdread-4.1.3
3. Compile, build and install:
./autogen.sh --prefix=/usr
make
sudo make install
Now we do the same for dvdnav:
1. Get the source:
wget http://www8.mplayerhq.hu/MPlayer/releases/dvdnav/libdvdnav-4.1.3.tar.bz2
2. Unpack it and navigate to the directory:
tar xvfj libdvdnav-4.1.3.tar.bz2
cd libdvdnav-4.1.3.tar.bz2
3. Compile, build and install:
./autogen.sh --prefix=/usr
make
sudo make install
Now that we have everything to read a dvd and its dvd menu, it’s time to install mplayer with this functionality.
1. Get the source:
svn checkout svn://svn.mplayerhq.hu/mplayer/trunk mplayer
2. Navigate to the directory:
cd mplayer
3. Compile, build and install. There are a lot of configuration options available for mplayer, but I will only mention the ones you need to enable dvd menus.
./configure --disable-dvdread-internal --enable-dvdnav
make
sudo make install
Now hurry up and try out some fancy dvd menu with mplayer. Here are a few of The Terminal:
