DVDs on PVR-350.

Even though there is a MPEG2 decoder on the PVR-350 card, there is no was (yet) to use this ability in when playing DVDs. Somewhat counter to what you would expect, but then there it is. Even more, until a couple of months ago, there were no Xv support in the framebuffer driver for X, which basically seems to mean that the TV output on an old, dumb graphics device would be just as good.

When reasearching various DVD playback programs, I found (like many before me) that you basically have to choose the less unsatisfactory solution for you. There is basically no alround solution.
Mplayer rocks for speed and lirc support, but there are no menues. Ogle is has really smooth playback and menu suport, but no lirc (why??). There is a companion program on the web that handles lirc -> ogle transactions, but it would not compile agains the versions of ogle i tried.
Xine is fully stacked in features, but the speed leaves much to be desired. I finally went for the xine solution, and with the following line I get pretty steady playback:

xine -D -V xshm -A alsa --no-logo --no-splash -pfhq dvd:/

The -D flag is strictly necessary for me.. the interlace lines are terrible.

It is mentioned once in a while in the relevant mailing lists that someone should provide direct support for PVR-350 in the form of a driver for Xine. So far, I have not seen anyone mention any progress on this. I really hope someone is working on it...