Fluendo DVD Player
http://www.fluendo.com/shop/product/fluendo-dvd-player/
© Fluendo 2008.
€ 19.99 (~$29.99 as of Sep 2009)
In my initial testing following my purchase, I was at first disappointed- every time I tried to play the DVD, Fluendo’s DVD Player just shut down. It does so cleanly- my usual trick of running it from the command line to debug it didn’t work- there was no output, which to me says they’ve coded it pretty cleanly. Preference changes are saved even when it shut down. I hesitate to call this crashing. When I bought PowerDVD for Linux on my Ubuntu install some time ago, I encountered pretty erratic behavior which turned out to be caused by having Desktop Effects (Compiz) turned on.
To me this seems ridiculous- I have to turn off effects to watch a DVD? Well, there are enough settings you can adjust to let you enable this. Go to ‘DVD Player’ > ‘Preferences’ (what’s with this menu structure by the way?). Click the ‘Video’ tab and change the Video Sink to “Ximagesink”. It should then work fine, even in Compiz.
With that fixed, and with audio working without a hitch, my biggest complaint is that even though the UI is controllable by GNOME’s appearance preferences, as you can see in the screenshot, the control bar at the bottom is hideously unskinned. I tried some more basic themes- nothing. It’s just ugly! Why? They’re just buttons and a slider.
Also- why the tiny 24pixel icon? Let’s scale it up!
App Score
GOOD
Replacement For
Apple DVD Player
Great 1.0 feature set. Works much smoother for me than PowerDVD did, too.
4 Responses to Fluendo DVD Player
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All content is © 2008-2010, Dave Lyon. All rights reserved.
September 10, 2009 at 9:16 pm
I must say the unthemed control bar look very out of place. I am still waiting for them to bring out the OpenSolaris version. Hopefully we will have a version by the time we release 2010.02
September 11, 2009 at 7:04 am
It had me confused for a while too. Colors and icons changed with GNOME theme changes- just not the widgets. The real downside for this type of visual flaw is that users will focus on that instead of how the app actually works. Hopefully they will fix that and release for OpenSolaris soon!
April 3, 2010 at 12:53 pm
I just purchased the DVD player. I am running Ubuntu 10.04 beta 1. The control bar at the bottom is now updated and matches the gnome ui.
I have zero complaints. It is working great and producing a excellent picture. Much better than Xine or any other player I’ve used with the libcss2 decoder.
Definitely worth the money.
April 5, 2010 at 8:33 am
Definitely- Fluendo does great work. I think that control bar was fully skinned in Gnome within a month or two.