I got this via e-mail:
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Could you implement some kind of sanity check on first startup to
ensure that mplayer was compiled with DVD support and Encoder
support (both are none standard in Gentoo). I was chasing a
problem I was having down to getting:
* Scanning DVD...
*** ERROR: No DVD tracks found ***
*** Check:
*** - Mplayer and transcode are installed
*** - Mplayer can play DVDs
*** - There is a DVD in the drive
While I had transcode installed and mplayer, and had symlinked
/dev/cdroms/cdrom0 to /dev/dvd - still I got the message, turned
out that I had compiled mplayer without dvd support for some
reason. Thus the error output wasn't really helpful in detecting the
problem, and a sanity check for this would be good to avoid futher
trouble of this kind.
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My initial thoughts on this are to implement a diagnostics mode,
which would have a list of common problems and try to check if each
one is "present". So it would check for the location of the binaries, if
possible check compile time options, check that it can retrieve info
from a DVD with mplayer, etc, etc.
