How to play DVD on PC

Continued from previous post.

So the new and shiny disks I bought were useless in every single windows computer (well, all two of them) I had available. No player I had would work. And I really didn't feel like wasting money on some external players that might or might not work any better.

Anyway, the first step seems to be "Don't bother using (newer) windows, it won't work". 

I also mentioned that I had another old computer handy. It's old, slow, power-hungry -- but it's free (as in unused and readily available) and had everything in place except its HD was relatively small. Fortunately I had one larger leftover disk so I was able to start playing with it without having to visit shops.

So considering the problem I had on hand I tried some media center-specific distributions first, like LinuxMCE and geexbox. There may have been others but I have deleted some of the downloaded ISOs already so I might already have forgotten. Some didn't work at all (failed to either install or start up after installing), and some I wasn't very pleased with.

Eventually I figured out that too many of these media center-type distros weren't to my liking, as for anything else than media stuff I pretty much had to fight the setup to get anything done. Not really fun. So moving on, to more generic desktop, with idea to install media center software (mainly ripping & DLNA sharing), so I went to Kubuntu first. Which didn't work at all on this computer. So Xubuntu then. Which worked nicely enough, though I think I might still wipe it and start over at some point with some other distro (I like bare-bones debian; it might not be nicest desktop around but at least it doesn't try to hide stuff from user like ubuntu-based setups like to do)

So to DVD ripping. After some quick searches it seemed that handbrake would be best option (and I was already familiar with it, although on Windows side), so after few magical apt-gets  that was ready to try. And what do you know, it would open and rip these troublesome disks with no problems (no, windows version couldn't). Very slowly, yes, this being ancient computer, but since this computer is built for single purpose only - to host copies of my DVDs (especially ones like certain rodent's clubhouse and other similar shows whose disks may encounter some very careless handling in our household) - lack of ripping speed is perfectly okay.

So next step was to set up media server. Kodi (formerly XBMC) was first, and it did work nicely, but it seemed to be using fair amount of CPU power when idle, so that was less nice. Then some other, server-only programs, but there was some weird connection issue that I couldn't figure out so I got rid of some and eventually ended up with mediatomb. Which didn't work either at start, so I tried also venerable samba share as quick and dirty solution. Which didn't work too well either.. Hmm.

After some (fruitless) searches I started to suspect physical ethernet connection. This computer was in a room that had old cable that previous owned had built by hand, and considering his handiwork around the house this was from substandard parts and made with even more substandard skills, so that cable was definitely a suspect. And computer informed me that it was using gigabit link. No wonder link's a bit unstable.

Unfortunately this cable is somewhat built in walls and I wasn't feeling like ripping them up so that had to do for now. Some more experimentation and now that computer is happily using 100Mbps link and now it actually can be connected remotely. Link speed still isn't as good as it should be so I may have to do more troubleshooting but it'll do for now. Curiously even with failing link downloads to that computer worked so cable wasn't my first guess.

So a weekend wasted there for such a tiny thing. Or maybe not, I had planned something like this for that computer for long time -- only now I actually had good enough reason to start working on it. And now I also have a dedicated linux computer I can play with at home. What (else) to do with it, that is the question...