Wow, that was really easy.

After futzing with mplayer for awhile tonight I decided that it wasn’t worth the headache and installed xine, as I previously mentioned.

I’m happy to report that not only is my MythTV now capable of playing DVDs in full, lush 5.1 surround, it also works with my MythTV remote. And it has menu support, which is something the mplayer does not yet have.

The hardest part to the troubleshooting was visiting xine’s website and realizing that the app was expecting a device /dev/dvd to exist. A simple symbolic link fixed that right up and the application started with no problems. I’m still going to have to screw with the remote settings a little before I have them the way I want, but I’m really pleased with how simple it was to make this change.

Oh, as an added benefit, the installation of xine that I am running came with libdvdcss so I can play all those fancy DRM’d DVDs that I have, along with the internationally zoned regional DVDs that I don’t have. Woohoo!