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[4BYE]

Hello,

It's about half a year ago that Osho and I wrote a topic about playing extracted DVD files through the library server. I searched through the topics but couldn't find anything new.

Is there any news about the ability to play extracted DVD files in the future?
I put so much money and work into my project of having everything available through the house.

I recently bought the PS3 (for Blu-Ray) and found out that there's a little program that lets you play extraced DVD files through the Playstation 3. But this is not the way I want to go.

I prefer one program to do it all!

And since I love MC12 for the way it handles AUDIO, library, tags etc. why not the same with extracted DVD files? I guess I'm not the only one needing this feature.

Thanks for any input.


Regards,


Theo

[scottlindner]

Have you figured this out yet?  I was under the impression MC12 would play DVDs from a hard drive but I'm starting to think it cannot.  I have converted our entire DVD collection to ISOs for preservation purposes but there doesn't appear to be a way to play them in MC12.  It seems so simple.  I can manually mount them with DaemonTools and play from the virtual drive it creates.

I'm currently using BeyondMedia as my DVD Library but that program is so outdated and broken.  I'm hoping MC will take on this one last itty bitty bit of work so I can stop using the pile of junk.  Anyway... any good word?

Scott

[Alex B]

An ISO file which is created from a DVD-video disc is not the same as "DVD on HD". It is a image file of the disc contents. It can be used for burning a new disc or, as you said, for mounting the disc with a DVD drive emulator program.

If suitable codecs are installed MC can play "DVD on HD" when the actual VOB and all other files from the original disc are in a VIDEO_TS folder (naturally the files may need to be decrypted).

I suppose that in theory it would be possible to add a component which would extract the files from an ISO package to a temp space and play the extracted files, but that would not be practical because of the enormous file sizes.

You can "convert" an ISO file to a DVD folder format. Just mount the image and copy all files and folders to a new folder on HD. The base folder name can be the name of the DVD video. After that you can delete the ISO file or keep it as a backup copy.

In general, an ISO file is not needed for successful DVD video burning if you are afraid of that. A DVD video disc doesn't contain any magic that would be lost when it is burned from a VIDEO_TS folder. You just need to use a program that can burn DVD video discs in the correct format. For example, Nero can do this.

[scottlindner]

"In general, an ISO file is not needed for successful DVD video burning if you are afraid of that. A DVD video disc doesn't contain any magic that would be lost when it is burned from a VIDEO_TS folder. You just need to use a program that can burn DVD video discs in the correct format. For example, Nero can do this."

People definitely use ISOs for archival purposes.

I get the feeling that folks that use MC have a strong opinion against ISOs for some unapparent reason.I think we can agree there is content on an ISO that is not in the DVD-Video structure.  Which is why folks like to use ISOs for archival purposes.  Why would I want to maintain two copies of my DVDs when I only need one?

[Alex B]

I said "in general". A usual DVD video disc does not contain files that could not be archived in the original file format (decrypted if needed) and burned back to a similarly working disc.

In any case, ISO is currently not a format that can be played with MC.

You can just mount the ISO files if you prefer to use them. Have you tried to associate the ISO file type with a DVD drive emulator so that it would be mounted automatically?

Discussion of other playback programs is off-topic here, but personally I'm not aware of programs that can access the ISO contents and play them without extracting the files or mounting the disc on a virtual drive.

[JimH]

So, I misunderstood.  Sorry.  You're saving an exact image of the disk.  As Alex says, that isn't necessary.

[scottlindner]

BeyondMedia plays ISOs directly from a large library of ISOs (what I currently use) and there are MCE plugins that do the same.  The problem is those programs blow for managing large music collections which is why I was attracted to MC.  Between my wife and I we have nearly 1000 CDs that I have extracted to APE or FLAC for archival purposes.  As you can imagine, my disk space requirements are in the multiple terabytes, but I don't care.  Disk space is cheap these days.

I do have a program that I use to mount the ISO to a drive, but I do not know of a way to tell MC to import the ISOs, launch a simple script to mount the image, and how to tell MC the file is a movie so I can associate other goodies with it like information about the movie.

I should send a screenshot of what I do today with BeyondMedia.  It might give you some ideas, but the rest of that program blows so I'm really hoping to figure out how MC can handle a hefty movie library that I've already built.  It's like the only thing MC doesn't appear to do to be the perfect media center.  I thought it did it.  I was reading some folks on the MC11 forums that do this today using a DaemonTools script, but they didn't post how they did it.  Since i saw no discussion of this at all on the MC12 forums I naturally assumed (my mistake) MC12 had already solved it natively.

Scott

[scottlindner]

So, I misunderstood.  Sorry.  You're saving an exact image of the disk.  As Alex says, that isn't necessary.

Does it matter if it's necessary?  People use ISOs for archival.  Why maintain two copies of a movie when you can maintain one?  I use FLAC and APE for my music collection for the same reason, but it isn't necessary.  I could just as easily play my music using MP3s, but why would I maintain two copies of my music, one for archival, and one for playback, if I can play directly from the archival quality?  It seems like a basic concept to me that i don't understand why there's such strong opposition to it.  Where is this coming from?  Is there a history of hating ISOs that a newbie to MC doesn't know about?

Scott

[rebecca1]

Isn't there a guide somewhere on the wiki?

I'm an mc noob, but all my dvds are on nas in iso format, works really well. This uses slysofts image mounting software in conjuction to shell integration.

[Alex B]

... It seems like a basic concept to me that i don't understand why there's such strong opposition to it.  Where is this coming from?  Is there a history of hating ISOs that a newbie to MC doesn't know about?

Why would someone hate ISO or any other disc image format? I have used ISO for disc archiving since 90's. I have actually requested that ISO creation could be added to MC's disc burner as an option. It would be useful for burning disc layouts that are created with one MC instance on other PCs or with other programs when needed.

I am not personally against any new formats that could be added to supported formats. According to what I have seen, JRiver is willing to add new formats if there is a popular demand and practical means are available.

I am just saying that ISO is not a standardized playback format. Playback from a VIDEO_TS folder is the most commonly used way for playing DVD video disc contents from a HD folder. Several well-known playback programs can do it, but even this system is not standardized by the usual authorities. Also, I wouldn't ask MPAA's opinion on this matter. Though we are speaking about non-DRM protected content, aren't we...

[scottlindner]

We're talking about DVDs I own.

As others have suggested a simple scripting capability to mount the ISO to a predetermined virtual drive using something like Daemon Tools is adequate.  This is how BeyondMedia and the MCE plugin do it.  No need to worry about the format.  Just allow for the scripting capability and to acknowledge the script as a movie in the catalog.  Heck, you can even ask the user if the ISO is a DVD-Video to know what to do with the ISO since not all ISOs will be a DVD or a DVD-Video.  I'd be fine with that.

Since the reason for wanting to playback from ISO seems to be at the core of this discussion I'll offer my reason.  It shouldn't matter but for some reason it seems to matter a great deal.  We own alot of DVDs.  We also own two DVD players.  Nothing new here really.  I'm sure lots of people own lots of DVDs and own more than one DVD player.  Where the problem comes in that the ISO solution is ideal for is our DVD players are destroying our DVDs.  We tried others but have found this to be a common problem.  I'm not sure why.  The best I could find is the manufacturing source plays a role.  I'll try to dig up the article if it matters.  The DVD players don't scratch the DVDs at all.  They look perfect.  But after a couple of minutes in the DVD players our newer DVDs no longer are acknowledged as DVDs in any form of ROM drive we have.  So I stopped using our DVDs plays and started dumping to ISO first even if we want to play them once.  The best I can determine is the heat produced by the DVD players is the cause.  I found an extremely detailed article written by an Australian several years ago.  I gave up because doing battle with the big corporations is a waste of time.  Plus, the computer media center frontend thing is all the rave these days anyway.

Cheers,
Scott