Fluendo DVD Player

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!

How Good is the Linux App?

Killer feature people talk about

Site has a User forum

App name should be marketable

Has a nice app icon

Uses Tango icon guidelines

Slick UI that's fun to use

Good-looking website

Top-level domain name

Site has FAQs for users

Site has a way to contact the developers

Packages for Ubuntu, Fedora, and openSUSE