The HyperNews Linux KHG Discussion Pages

Question: DVD-ROM and Linux? (sorry if it's off topic...)

Forum: The Linux Kernel Hackers' Guide
Keywords: DVD DVD-ROM MPEG ISO9660
Date: Wed, 17 Sep 1997 19:22:47 GMT
From: Joel Hardy <deeng@inficad.com>

     Please forgive me (and don't flame me too hard) if this has already been discussed or if there's someplace better to discuss this. I know Linux should support any SCSI or IDE DVD-ROM drive, but so far (at least to my knowledge), it'll only act like a CD-ROM drive. I really don't know much about the DVD standard (if anybody knows, please point me to some documentation!), but my guess is that DVD-ROM discs (I think I saw Walnut Creek selling 4.7 gigs of stuff on one disc) would probably just be the same ISO9660 standard, so there wouldn't be any need to support anything extra with that. My question is this: is there any support planned to read the MPEG streams and whatever else a DVD player can get off of a DVD movie disc? Does anybody know anything about the format that a DVD movie is stored in? Does anybody even know if this'd be best implemented as a new filesystem or something completely different? I'd really love to get this working, but I'm a newbie to kernel programming, so if there's anybody else out there with similar goals (and especially some information about this!), please contact me!

-Joel Hardy (deeng@inficad.com)