MyLongNickName's Journal: Linux for DVD/Multimedia

Never used Linux before.

Here is what I want to do:
I have a guest bedroom with PC that I use for business purposes. I want to have a separate partion (or live CD) that will allow guests to boot and play DVD's and/or CD's.

I want boot times to be as quick as possible, and I want the interface to be very simple. Ideally, it would be as easy as "put DVD in drive, turn on PC, wait 15 seconds, movie starts".

Any thoughts on where to begin?

Not sure...

[Evro]

Not sure how to do the dual/multi-boot thing. I imagine grub or LILO is what you want for choosing a partition from which to boot. But how are people supposed to put the disc in and THEN turn the machine on?

Re:Not sure...

[MyLongNickName]

Errrrm... Good point :)

I did find GeexBox which does a a lot of what I want, except it is a live-cd instead of a disk partition.

I'd still like to poke around and see what else is out there. Maybe at some point I'll be brave enough to look at the source.

Wonder if it is C or a C variant...

Re:Copy the contents of GeexBox?

[MyLongNickName]

Actually, digging into the CD, there is this option. I will play with it and see how it works. I want to try it on a PC with less valuable informatino on it though... I back up my computer regularly, but I am sure there is a program or two I'd have a hard time replacing :)

My two-year old's PC might work nicely though... he only has one game on it, and it would take all of ten minutes to reinstall :)

The obvious answer...

[seinman]

Just put a standalone DVD player in there? You can get a small TV pretty damn cheap these days.

Re:The obvious answer...

[MyLongNickName]

You must be new here :)

I do something

[rbochan]

similar with an older laptop I have. It's a little more interactive than what you're doing (due to a manual login) but you should be able to make it less so. The machine in question is running Debian unstable, with the latest and greatest codecs [mplayerhq.hu] installed to cover the various media types. Along with Xine and a couple of customized files, it works well for my purposes.

The customized files are as follows: .xinitrc

exec xine

and at the bottom of a vanilla .bash_profile is the line:

ps ax|grep -q "[ ]`w

Movix

[CableModemSniper]

http://movix.sourceforge.net/ [sourceforge.net] Originaly started off as a liveCD but it can boot off the HD now. It just brings up a console interface to mplayer. (It's also capable of being netbooted).