osw said
well, you must doing something awfuly wrong there... mplayer with proper settings in config does all job like a charm - I do prefer vanila guiless mplayer over smplayer which is what happens when porting qt to wps... a disaster - so my advice is RTFM...
I am trying to RTFM - the only problem is that there is no FM! Also you must have missed what I said - it starts and plays the dvd for a short time then stops - it can be made to play some more for a time that is variable but after the first ten minutes I just give up trying to make it work. Maybe you would like to post your settings that make it work like a charm (and also what hardware you are using).
obiwan is correct in saying
An application that sets itself up correctly without intervention is by that fact more polished, and preferable to work with.
Hi!
Here is TFM -
http://www.mplayerhq.hu/DOCS/HTML/en/index.html - happy time reading...

Also I must admit - playing dvd's with mplayer is somewhat crappy (perhaps it's time for me to RTFM again

) - but I did short investigation and it does work under smplayer - when dvd structure is chosen from directories - then you can see list of all chapters and I did open some to see what happens after 1m 48s ..

- so it did play entire chapter 16m long... that way you can watch dvd's with mplayer (but it's not as convenient as simple putting dvd into drive and waiting for autostart - that's right - or clicking fancy buttons)
Here is my <boot drive>:\home\default\.mplayer\config :
ao=dart
vo=kva:snap
pp=6
#double=yes
font=arial.ttf
subfont-text-scale=4
subcp=cp1250
vf=screenshot=pp=de,hqdn3d=lavcdeint=denoise3d:4:3:6
#aspect=4:3
#aspect=16:9
subfont-encoding=unicode
sub-no-text-pp=1
#noidx=1
# Settings for stream/file caching
cache=8192
cache-min=30
#vf=expand=0:-90:0:0
# Setting for Browser User Agent response
user-agent=NSPlayer/4.1.0.3856
colorkey=0x000001
well in addition to that there is arial.ttf in the same directory
and enabled freetype2 via. ft2gui2 for mplayer.exe - to have nice antialiased fonts
my hardware is:
singlecore celeron 2.2 ghz (nortwood) on MSI 845PE MAX with 768 MB of DDR1 RAM
soundcard is sblive 5.1 (emu101)
graphics card is sapphire radeon 9600 PRO Atlantis with 128 MB RAM on 128-bit bus (identified by SNAP as 9600 XT...)
mouse is logitech on usb under amouse driver
my software is:
operating system is ECS 2.0 rc5
smp os/4 kernel (experimental one) with acpi(3.14) - /smp /apic /cd switches
Snap build is 505 - and it drives 23'' samsung (sm2343bw) lcd panel with native resolution 2048 * 1152 on DVI cable
sblive driver is native one 0.82 beta - smp ready
mplayer build is mplayer-dev-SVN-r27724-OS2-4.3.2
as you can see there is no fancy hardware or unusual soft here and yes "everything" works like a charm for me - except DVD's

- but it's something I did realize today

frankly never needed play them from pc - standalone dvd player (cost ~ 25 euro...) is getting more and more dust here on rack - only expierience with dvd's I got are constant glitches with scratched discs... and that's why prefer anything else what is not structured like mpegs2/4 spread on 4.7 GB in 900MB chunks... but of course it's only my opinion and I do agree that inconvenient way, mplayer plays dvd's is it's disadvantage - if vlc is smooth on that, that's for sure another good reason to port it to os/2 (beside possibility to compare them on warp like apples to apples...)
another disadvantage which I found (for your information) is fact that in such config, mplayer is bit to slow to play hd.wmv movies (720p) - so I play them with kmp.exe - K Movie Player is let's call it "custom build of mplayer (?)" -
made by KO Myung-Hun - and being based on mplayer - is somehow optimized on speed and less hungry for MHz's, so it can play such movies smoothly unfortunately my system is really to slow

to process fullHD movies (1080p) but again I did only checked that wmv's - so it might be that other formats will produce different effects.
ps. I'm not quite sure if eventual port of vlc/2 (cute name

) will resolve buggy dvd support as it sports libdvdcss library - and that is what do response for dvd part of player - mplayer is using it also (dvdcss.dll under os/2)- so you should expect similar problems with vlc/2 unless you improve os/2 port of libdvdcss somehow... - it will resolve mplayer issues too

)
cheers