[vdr] problems playing DVDs

[Manuel Panea-Doblado <mpd@rzg.mpg.de>]

Hi, all. I have recently installed a DVD drive on my VDR machine to be
able to watch DVDs.

I first tried the DVD plugin, but when playing a DVD there are many
short interruptions of video and audio, perhaps 3 or 4 every 10
seconds, each very short, a 10th of a second perhaps, but it makes it
unusable. I have a slow CPU: a Pentium MMX at 200 MHz (400 bogomips),
but it is otherwise enough for other VDR functions, including
e.g. timeshifting. I checked the hdparm for the DVD and they seem to
be fine. I also tried copying a portion of the DVD to the harddisk and
playing it from there, with same results. So what is causing this
glitches while playing a DVD?

Then I tried playing the DVD with Mplayer and it works very well!
Except that I haven't had much success configuring my remote control
for using it with Mplayer, so I can only control the DVD replay with
the computer keyboard.

Does anyone know in what way the DVD plugin and Mplayer differ while
playing a DVD? I thought it must be just reading MPEG data from the
DVD and sending it to the DVB card, so why does Mplayer work well and
the plugin doesn't?

And what are you people using to play DVDs? Should I rather try to get
the DVD plugin working right or should I instead invest my time in
configuring Mplayer to respond to my remote control?

Some details about my VDR configuration:

VDR 1.3.12, DVD Plugin 0.3.5b06, libdvdnav 0.1.9, libdvdread 0.9.4,
libdvdcss 1.2.8, liba52 0.7.4.

Thanks for any help, hints or comments.

-- 
  Manuel Panea