## 4.1 CD/DVD drives

Linux documentation excerpt:

Modern CD-ROM drives can attain very high head speeds, yet some CD-ROM drives are capable of running at reduced speeds. There are several reasons that might make you consider changing the speed of a CD-ROM drive:

- There have been reports of read errors at these high speeds, especially with badly pressed CD-ROMs. Reducing the speed can prevent data loss under these circumstances.
- Many CD-ROM drives are annoyingly loud, a lower speed may reduce the noise.

You can reduce the drive speed with hdparm or a program called setcd. It works like this:

`hdparm -E [speed] [cdrom device]`

`setcd -x [speed] [cdrom device]`

You can also try

`echo current_speed:4 > /proc/ide/[cdrom device]/settings`

but you will need root privileges. The following command may also help:

`echo file_readahead:2000000 > /proc/ide/[cdrom device]/settings`

This sets prefetched file reading to 2MB, which helps with scratched CD-ROMs. It is recommended that you also tune your CD-ROM drive with hdparm:

`hdparm -d1 -a8 -u1 (cdrom device)`

This enables DMA access, read-ahead, and IRQ unmasking (read the hdparm man page for a detailed explanation).

Please refer to "`/proc/ide/[cdrom device]/settings`" for fine-tuning your CD-ROM.

## 4.2 DVD playback

MPlayer uses `libdvdread` and `libdvdcss` for DVD decryption and playback. These two libraries are contained in the `libmpdvdkit/` subdirectory of the MPlayer source tree, you do not have to install them separately. We opted for this solution because we had to fix a libdvdread bug, and apply a patch which adds cracked CSS keys caching support to libdvdcss. This results in a large speed increase because the keys do not have to be cracked every time before playing. The cracked keys are stored in the `~/.mplayer/DVDKeys` directory.

MPlayer can also use system-wide `libdvdread` and `libdvdcss` libraries, but this solution is not recommended, as it can result in bugs, library incompatibilities, and slower speed.

Support for DVD navigation via `dvdnav` is being worked on, but not finished yet.

#### Old-style DVD support - OPTIONAL

Useful if you want to play encoded VOBs from hard disk. Compile and install libcss 0.0.1 (not newer) for this (If MPlayer fails to detect it, use the `-csslib /path/to/libcss.so` option).

For the complete list of available options, please read the man page.

## 4.3 VCD playback

Playing standard Video CDs:

`mplayer -vcd <track> [-cdrom-device device]`

Examples:
`mplayer -vcd 1
mplayer -fs -vcd 2 -cdrom-device /dev/hdc`

Notes:

- Do not mount VCDs to play the DAT files directly! It may work under Windows but will not under Linux. You have to play VCDs with the `-vcd` option.
- VCD disks usually have 2 tracks: a data track (containing autostart Windows playback program, karaoke data etc) and a mode-2 track (the movie). So try `-vcd 2` first.
- The default VCD device is `/dev/cdrom`. If your setup differs, make a symlink, or specify the correct device on the command line with the `-cdrom-device` option.