There are several excellent applications readily available for you to use to play VCD and DVD media. Here we shall look at two of them: Xine and Mplayer. These can also play CD and digital audio music files.
Xine
The xine application may be used to play VCD and DVD. You can start xine from the Main Menu:
Main Menu --> Sound & Video --> xine
The xine user interface is highly intuitive as it resembles a normal VCD/DVD player with all the basic control knobs and buttons.
Click to view screen shot Fig 6.5 Xine Control Panel
To play a VCD place the VCD into the CD-ROM drive and click on the VCDO button on the xine control panel.
To play a DVD place the DVD into the DVD drive and click on the DVD button on the xine control panel.
The volume control can be adjusted by clicking on the volume control button.
In the event that the xine control panel interferes with the playing screen image, you can hide it by right-clicking on the panel itself and select GUI visibility. This will hide the xine control panel. To bring back the xine control panel right-click on the playing screen and select GUI visibility again.
Xine is a very powerful multimedia application with many features. It can also play audio CDs as well as digital audio files.
MPlayer
Mplayer is a popular movie player for Linux. In addition to being able to play VCD and DVD it is also able to handle a wide variety of audio and video file and streaming data formats. Hence it is useful to use Mplayer as the universal multimedia player. The Mplayer GUI can be started from the Main Menu,Main Menu --> Sound & Video
--> More Sound and Video Applications
--> Movie Player
On start up, the main Mplayer control screen and the Mplayer video output screens are displayed.
Click to view screen shot Fig 6.6 Mplayer Control Screen
Click to view screen shot Fig 6.7 Mplayer Video Screen
The control screen enables you to control the operations of Mplayer while the video screen displays any video that is being played. In addition right-clicking on the mouse when it is inside either the control or video screens will also bring up a menu for controlling the use of Mplayer.
The Mplayer control screen enables you to perform the following:
- start, stop and pause play
- go to the next and previous stream
- jump to the first and last tracks
- adjust the sound balance
- adjust the volume and mute
- select files to play
- set up a playlist
- set the video and audio equalizer
- configure preferences
- exit the Mplayer application
All of the above functions are represented by intuitive knob, dial and button icons on the control screen making it very easy to use Mplayer.
To play a VCD, place the VCD in the CD-ROM drive, move the mouse over the control screen or video screen and right-click it. Select,
VCD --> Open disk
To play a DVD, perform the above for VCD but instead select, DVD --> Open disk
The size of the video screen can be controlled by right-clicking on the mouse and selecting normal size, double size or full screen. When you are in the full screen mode, to return to normal size, right-click on the mouse and select normal size.
Exercises
- Play an audio CD using the CD Player
- Play an audio digital music using xmms
- Play a VCD using xine and mplayer
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Tutorial: Multimedia and Graphics Access
1. Multimedia Access and Players
2. The Volume Control Applet
3. Playing Audio CDs
4. Playing Digital Audio Files
5. Playing VCD and DVD
6. Graphic Images Access
7. Using File Manager to Access Image Files
8. gThumb Image Viewer
