Playing DVDs on the AmigaONE 500

DvPlayer

I finally managed to play a DVD on an Amiga! So what?

Well, I bought DvPlayer, a video player for playing back DVDs amongst other formats, two years back and never successfully played a DVD with it on my Sam440flex. This all changed on Friday.

At home we often watch DVDs upstairs on the PC, unfortunately the PC's very noisy and therefore not the best for quieter moments in films. On the other hand the AmigaONE 500 runs almost silently so I thought I would try out DvPlayer again on this new machine and see if I could get it playing DVDs. I fired up DvPlayer and was soon disappointed when the window locked up when trying to play a DVD.

I set about finding a solution and after a few web searches I came across a useful forum post. I also double checked the DvPlayer manual for requirements and it turned out the avcodec.library installed on my system was an older version and I was missing a couple of video codecs that were recommended in the forum post. Once these were installed and I had tweaked the tool types to switch overlay mode off it worked great!

DvPlayer's tool types

Playback is nice and smooth, the sound is decent and fullscreen mode works. Finally I can get some use out of DvPlayer!