Issues playing DVD as ISO files

[Anonymous]

Hi everybody,

I’m starting a new thread on this topic (already discussed in http://www.wiimc.org/forum/viewtopic.php?f=4&t=671 with a bit misleading title) because I think it’s a quite relevant problem, in particular for people (like me) having recent wii with the new damned D3-2 drive, able to read original DVD games only. The possibility to play video DVD as ISO files on USB or network storages is then a very very interesting feature of wiimc.

The main issue in playing ISO with wiimc is the wrong detection of the total time of the media. This leads to wrong progress bar, problem to correctly seek by pointing and video stop playing after few minutes.

For investigating the problem I did some tests using a windows porting of mplayer (the one that come with SMPlayer, based on mplayer svn r29355).
Playing a DVD ISO file with the command:

mplayer “c:/filename.iso”

produces the same (wrong) total time shown by wiimc. The way to solve the issue is to declare the DVD device. This can be done in two ways (for playing the first chapter):

mplayer dvd://1 –dvd-device “c:/filename.iso”

or

mplayer “dvd://1/c:/filename.iso”

I tried to adopt the seconds solution in the wiimc code, adding the “dvd://1/” prefix to filenames with .iso extension, e.g. “dvd://1/usb1:/filename.iso”. Unfortunately this solution didn’t work as expected and I got an “Error loading file” message.

I believe this could be the right way to solve the issue of playing DVD ISO files, but I’ve no more ideas on how to make it work.

Any suggestions are really welcome.

[rodries]

It’s possible but it would require some additional alterations to the MPlayer code in WiiMC. I don’t intend to do it myself but if another coder does and submits a patch I would include it.

Really there’s nothing more to be said, unless you’re a coder and want to work on it.

[Anonymous]

Ok. I’ll see what I can do in my spare time.

About patches, what do you think about the proposal for zooming during video playback: http://www.wiimc.org/forum/viewtopic.php?f=6&t=908#p3953.
I’m using it and it works fine.

[Anonymous]

I’ve tested the last svn r700. Really a good work, Tantric (I was quite far from this…)!!! It works fine on my iso/ifo samples via dvdnav://, on a 8G usb memory key and an external usb 500G disk. I didn’t try on remote storages.

Using the dvd:// the player freezes. However I noticed that having one of the vob file of the iso in the restore_points table, the video starts, even if the time is wrong. I hope this can help.

[Anonymous]

I found a solution to the dvd:// issue. I simply disabled the stream cache. I did’n test it on remote devices.
Fixes refer to svn r703:

mplayer.c line 3414

if(strncmp(filename,"dvdnav:",7) == 0 || strncmp(filename,"dvd:",4) == 0)

stream_cache_size=-1;

moreover it would be better to wake-up the USB device even when the filename is stored as dvd_device.

mplayer.c lines 2639, 4647, 4716

else if (

(!dvd_device && strncmp(filename, "usb", 3) == 0) ||

(dvd_device && strncmp(dvd_device, "usb", 3) == 0)

)

WakeupUSB();

Other 2 small fixes:

menu.cpp: lines 5781 and 5957

if(percent > 1.0) percent = 1.0;

Finally, I tested the zoom patch http://www.wiimc.org/forum/viewtopic.php?f=6&t=908#p3953 and it works fine on both dvd and dvdnav playback. It would be nice to have it in a next release of wiimc 😉

[rodries]

Thanks for the patches. You actually need the cache for dvd://. It looks like the latest mplayer svn (see r705) has made this issue go away though – dvd: is working for me now, with the cache enabled.

The other changes look good, I have committed them.

I haven’t had a chance yet to review the zooming patch.

[Anonymous]

This is a good news! I’ll do try your last commit.
About caching, I was wondering why dvdnav only switched it off… but the mplayer code is such a mess that I gave up to seek an answer in the code!!

[rodries]

You probably won’t find an answer in the code but…

dvdnav has its own internal cache, and so MPlayer’s cache must be disabled for dvdnav to work properly.

Now the only big problem is dvdnav won’t work well over SMB, since dvdnav’s cache is being used, and it’s not large enough for playback over SMB (it works, but it’s choppy). At the moment I have no idea how to increase the dvdnav cache to fix this. See libdvdnav/read_cache.c

[Anonymous]

Thanks for the hint about read_cache.c. I’ll give it a look.

In the meanwhile, I set-up a sharing on a pc (Win XP) for testing purpose over smb. It works fine, except for dvdnav where I got the “choppy” behavior you described.

I also noticed that sharing a cd/dvd drive produces, almost always, empty listing in wiimc . The same share, opened by another PC, shows the folder’s content correctly. I have to investigate further…

[Author]

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