using in MacOS X

[Florian G. Pflug]

On Fri, Oct 12, 2001 at 10:48:52AM -0400, neil epstein wrote:
> I see the manual doesn't have any update for the MacOS X so I'm a little
> lost, I hope someone should be kind enough to help.
> 
> How do I get this to work?
> 
> I downloaded the vlc for MacOS X.. is that all? The program decompress and
> runs, but how do I get it to play a DVD? I tried using the terminal to run
> the vlc, but it said it couldn't find the program vlc to run. Do I still
> need to compile this program or is there further stuff to download?

you need to run vlc from the command line. Change to the directory where you
copied the vlc.app into, and do:

./vlc.app/Contents/MacOS/vlc dvd:/dev/rdisk1

vlc should open, and start playing the dvd. You can also try the new
QuickTime output plugin by starting vlc which

./vlc.app/Contents/MacOS/vlc -I macosx_qt -V macosx_qt dvd:/dev/rdisk1

this should give you smoother playback, but it currently has _no_ interface,
and only supports full-screen mode.


> Also, will this work in any Mac with a dvd player that can play DVD's in
> 9.2.1, or is only those machines that can play DVD in 10.1 with Apple's app?
> I say this because apple's DVD app only works on software based DVD players.
> The first few generations of DVD in Apple hardware, used hardware based
> decoders to run. This program would be a great alternative if it was able to
> run in these machines. It would be something that myself and many others
> would pay to have.

It should work on any Mac running OSX. If you want to use the QuickTime
output plugin for better speed, you need OSX 10.1.  10.0 doesn't
support hardware yuv overlays (which is something every modern graphics card
support) which is exactly what makes the video output faster when using the
QuickTime output.

But since vlc doesn't use the hardware decoder addon-board present in the G3s
(which is capable of doing nearly all the decoding work in hardware I guess) 
, it isn't capable of playing DVDs at 25fps at the moment (at least not on
my G3/350 with ATI Rage 128).

Hopefully OSX support will improve, so check the website periodically ;-)

greetings, Florian Pflug