Seamless is a software DVD player, a program that allows you to watch DVD movies on your laptop or desktop computer. Seamless offers support for menus, angles and many other popular DVD features, and is able to play most commercial DVD movies available. Currently, Seamless offers a simple graphical user interface, that can be controlled with either the keyboard or a remote control. It includes a full-screen mode that is adequate for comfortably watching movies using your computer monitor or a external TV set.
Seamless is available under the terms of the GNU General Public License, which means you are free to download it, install it in as many computers as you please, and even hand it all of your friends and relatives (they'll surely love it!). Also, if you are so inclined, you can study Seamless' program source code and modify it to better fit your needs and desires. If you want to read the fine print, you can take a look at the actual license, which not only will let you understand the exact actual copying conditions, but will give you a peek into the wonderful world of Free Software.
Seamless was written as a personal project by yours truly, Martin Soto.
If you are just looking for a free movie player, and your personal interests don't particularly lie in the computer or multimedia realms, Seamless may be still too hard to install and too uncomfortable to operate for your tastes. I'm trying to improve this situation, but since I'm working on Seamless in my scarce free time, I cannot make any hard commitments about when it'll be ready for general consumption. Of course, you're still welcome to read on, and judge for yourself if the current state of Seamless is adequate for your needs.
As far as I know, Seamless will only work on an i386 running Linux. Currently, it won't run on PowerPC (or any other big endian) processors, but this may be easy to fix.
Since video decoding happens completely in software, a relatively fast processor is necessary (according to my experience, 1.2 GHz or faster should do). Having good support for the XVideo extension in your video driver is also very helpful to achieve smooth playback.
At the moment, Seamless can only be retrieved from the Bazaar repository at SourceControl.Net. First,
you have to register the Seamless archive with
baz:
baz register-archive http://mirrors.sourcecontrol.net/soto@freedesktop.org--2004-personal/
Now, you can get the actual source code by typing
baz get soto@freedesktop.org--2004-personal/seamless--mainline seamless
In order to compile from the Bazaar repository, you need to have the following packages installed:
Python version 2.4 or newer. Make sure the corresponding C development files (libraries, headers) are also installed.
GStreamer current (0.10) version from CVS. You need to check out and compile at least the gstreamer, gst-plugins-base, gst-plugins-ugly and gst-python modules. Released versions of these packages most probably won't work.
When compiling the GStreamer plugins, check the configure script output for the gst-plugin-* packages, to make sure that at least alsa, xvimage, mpeg2dec and a52dec will be compiled. If configure reports that a plugin won't be compiled, install the proper dependencies.
PyGTK version 2.8 or newer.
libdvdread I'm using version 0.9.4.
Pyrex. I'm using version 0.9.3.
GNU autotools. Autoconf version 2.59 or later, Automake version 1.9, and Libtool version 1.5.6 or later.
Except for the GStreamer related packages, which currently must be the development versions and have to be downloaded and compiled manually, all other packages should be available from your favorite GNU/Linux distribution (I'm using Ubuntu Breezy.)
If you managed to get the dependencies right, compiling Seamless itself is not that hard. Move to the seamless main directory and type
./autogen.sh
make
If everything went fine, you should be ready to run after this step.
To start the program, run the src/seamless.py
script in the source tree. The default configuration displays
video through the XVideo XServer extension, and plays audio
through the first ALSA supported sound card found. This should
work out of the box in most modern systems.
In case you need to tweak this setup, you can run Seamless with
the --help option to see a description of the
available parameters.
Once playing, operation is pretty simple:
Use the arrow keys to move inside menus and the
When playing a film Esc takes you to the menu ("menu" key in a normal remote)
PageUp and PageDown jump chapters back and forth.
Shift+RightArrow and Shift+LeftArrow jump 10 seconds forward and backward, respectively.
Clicking anywhere on the main window switches between normal and full screen mode.
P pauses playback. Pressing P again restarts it.
F2 switches audio streams.
F3 switches angles.
Closing the window terminates the program.
Hosting for this project provided by GNA, SourceForge and SourceControl.Net.