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[dpippel]

I searched the board and found some information related to MC ISO support, but most of it referred to MC13 and/or third party solutions. Forgive me if this has been asked before.

I've ripped a goodly percentage of my DVD collection to ISO files. Does MC15 support direct playback of ISOs? If so what do I need to do in order to accomplish this? If not, is native ISO support something that's on the "to-do list"?

[Matt]

Are you mounting the ISO as a drive with Daemon tools, Alcohol, etc., and just want Media Center to automate this? 

Or are you looking for support for playing an ISO without the need to mount it?

[dpippel]

#2 Matt. I was wondering if there were any plans to allow MC to handle ISO playback without the need of third-party software.

[Matt]

Native support for ISO playback isn't currently on the radar.

Supporting mounting programs (I think there are some free ones that work well) might be a middle ground.

Is there a reason you don't rip to a VIDEO_TS folder instead?  This has been our current focus, since it's the common practice.

[dpippel]

I find ISO to be much more convenient for me. If I ever need to burn a physical copy of a title for example. Anyway, thanks for the information. I'll look into Daemon Tools or something similar and see how that solution works out.

[roopertd]

You could consider converting your ISO's to VIDEO_TS folders. J River works great for organizing and playing them.
I use a program called winrar to unzip/convert mine.
The only time i ever use an ISO is when i plan on burning a dual layer DVD, and it is always accompanied by an mds file.
An mds file contains information about how to split the   ISO into 2 layers.
This situation is rare, so i much prefer the VIDEO_TS folder.
With the VIDEO_TS you can can still burn a copy, but you have to pick the location of the layer split.
This situation is rare for me too since dual layer discs are expensive.
When i want to burn a copy i find it easier and cheaper to shrink the VIDEO_TS to a single layer ISO.
It takes about 2 minutes.

[gvanbrunt]

One thing, MC uses "side car" tagging of videos so even if they create an automount feature you it won't be able to write to an ISO. Or put cover art in a directory etc. I can see this being a supportability issuee for JRiver even for the automount situations.

Seems simple enough on the surface, but there are a lot of considerations. Still though, I would like the feature as well.

[jmone]

I store all my discs as ISO on my HDD (mostly Blu-ray & HD-DVD but the odd DVD) and happily use MC to tag, add coverart, etc and they mount and play back just fine (I use Virtual Clone Drive to do the actual mounting).

Have a read of the Wiki at http://wiki.jrmediacenter.com/index.php/DVD_Library_in_Media_Center under the MC13 section that still applies....

[famu97]

I searched the board and found some information related to MC ISO support, but most of it referred to MC13 and/or third party solutions. Forgive me if this has been asked before.

I've ripped a goodly percentage of my DVD collection to ISO files. Does MC15 support direct playback of ISOs? If so what do I need to do in order to accomplish this? If not, is native ISO support something that's on the "to-do list"?

 Hey this is easy to get around using your ISO DVD files and still being able to play back in MC.  I use this free program called Virtual Clone Drive - http://www.slysoft.com/en/virtual-clonedrive.html. It's software that runs on your pc and allows you to mount ISO files as a DVD-ROM drive on your pc.  it's basically a software DVD-ROM drive.  Once you double-click your iso image file or just mount it manually, it then appears as a DVD movie in your DVD-ROM drive.  MC should auto start playing it as soon as it mounts if that's how you have it set.  Problem solved

[aksdb]

Problem solved

No it's not, since the request was for "native" and "direct" support (i.e., as VLC for example does it). Yes, there are workarounds, but if you consider using third party software a solution, then we would need no feature requests at all and just use a bunch of different software that all fit another case.

[dpippel]

No it's not, since the request was for "native" and "direct" support (i.e., as VLC for example does it). Yes, there are workarounds, but if you consider using third party software a solution, then we would need no feature requests at all and just use a bunch of different software that all fit another case.

Yes, I was hoping for native ISO support in MC15. Third party solutions work but are not ideal IMO. This reminds me of how FLAC support used to work in MC. It was provided by a third-party plugin for a long time until JRiver finally decided to incorporate it directly into the product. Hopefully the same thing will eventually happen with ISO. It's a much cleaner and customer-friendly approach.

[jmone]

A couple of progs will parse an ISO internally to provide support for "direct" DVD Playback but as a big ISO format supporter I personal have no desire for MC to try to do this for a couple of reasons:
1) ISO is an image container designed to hold all the info on a physical disc.  This disc can be a CD, DVD, Blu-ray, HD-DVD and who knows what else.
2) Existing Mounting Progs like VCD do a great job of parsing these ISO files and mounting them correctly so that the become available to Windows/MC as if they were a native CD, DVD, Blu-ray, HD-DVD and based on the Autoplayback settings they will then fire up the appropriate app / playback settings.
3) MC lets you add coverart, tag, manage, launch the mounting of the ISO, and then the playback of the content if it is a DVD (and if it is a Blu-ray it plays in TMT etc).

Its taken Slysoft has for years continued to support and develop VCD and IMHO it is the best of them out there.  I'd rather MC folk keep working on stuff we need elsewhere and not try to replicate stuff that already works very very well.....but they ignore my arguments on this all the time - so like anything if enough people want this feature then I'm you may be able to convince them!

Thanks
Nathan

[jmone]

One downside of using ISO for DVDs is that without a native MC ISO Parser you can not stream them over DLNA etc....

[aiwendil]

sorry for hitchhiking this threat, but as I've got a problem matching this topic, I felt free to do this.

I'm still in the evaluating period of this software. I've installed it for the first time to try if this program is able to handle my collection of ISO based movies. So, I followed the instructions of the wiki to integrate my collection of ISOs - and failed. The current status is that I'm able to see them under "documents", and a double-click will start playing (I've installed slysofts "virtual clone drive"). But I'm not able to change the "media type field" to "video" as there is only a field named "file type", which contains "ISO".

What do I misunderstand?

[rick.ca]

What do I misunderstand?

That there's no Media Type field. There is. Change it from "Data" to "Video."

[jmone]

You may not have Media Type shown - right click on a Column Heading and select Media Type to be displayed (see pic).  You can then edit it.

[aiwendil]

Thank you for your tips - together, they solved my first problem. I'm quite sure that there will be more questions - this is a great peace of software with lots of functions to be detected. I'll keep you informed about my progress (hopefully!) to master this challenge...