Thursday, November 12, 2009

Fluendo DVD player initial reaction

I bought the Fluendo DVD player for OpenSolaris last night, and there seem to be some very rough edges.  For one, the /usr/bin/fluendo-dvd script doesn't work out of the box and spews shell syntax errors.  It assumes that "/bin/sh" is actually bash, which isn't the case on OpenSolaris.  Changing the first line of the script to "#!/bin/bash" fixes the problem and the binary launches.

I've installed the player on two systems, both running development build 126 of OpenSolaris.  One is my Sun Ultra 40 desktop, and the other is my Toshiba Portege r500 laptop.  One common gripe in general is that the player has no control buttons at all (e.g. play, stop, pause, etc.).  To control the player, one needs to go through the "DVD Player" menu, which is very odd.
There is also no evidence of the capability to navigate forward or backwards through a movie at higher or lower rates.

OpenSolaris itself is not contributing to a positive user experience, as after watching a movie for any more than ten minutes results in the audio stream being corrupted by what sounds like static clicks and hisses.  Stopping and restarting the player causes the audio issue to go away, but it comes back after a short time.  This exact same issue occurs for other gstreamer applications, so this is not fluendo-dvd player problem.  There is likely a bug in the audio framework.

Aside from these common issues, the player is unable to play movies on my Toshiba Portege laptop.  The first time I attempted to play a movie (after having applied the above fix to the launcher script), the application crashed with a segmentation fault.  I have the core dump if anyone from Fluendo wishes to debug the issue (the segfault occurs in fluendo_css_descrambler_descramble()).  From that point on, any attempt to play a movie results in the following popup.
I'm not sure what to make of that.  Perhaps there are some file permission issues on this system, but the error is cryptic enough that there's no hope of diagnosing what the problem is.

On the positive side, on the one system I'm able to get it working, the video quality is excellent.

The laptop is the main platform from which I'd like to use this, so the current situation is disappointing.  I'm hoping that these are simple bugs that can be expediently fixed, and that the mail I sent to the support channel at Fluendo last night will be answered (I'd expect so since the 20 Euros one pays for this includes 1 year of support).

OpenSolaris DVD player from Fluendo

Fluendo released their DVD player for OpenSolaris today!

http://www.fluendo.com/shop/product/fluendo-dvd-player/