One click launch of Blu-ray rips

[imilne]

I know there's "kind of" support for Blu-rays in NPVR now via the LAV splitter and audio decoder, but I've never really managed to get it working that well, and you're still left without support for subtitles, never mind full-menu support if you want that too. Therefore, I still play all of my blu-ray discs via TotalMediaTheater.

Not that I really have the drive space for it, but I started looking at options for ripping some of them (to iso, and using ClownBD to make them movie-only), but wanted a nice solution for launching TMT via NPVR direct to the mounted ISO. Turns out the solution is reasonably simple:

Rather than tell NPVR the location of VirtualCloneDrive's daemon.exe, I changed the config file so that it called a batch file instead:

Code:

<DaemonToolsExe>D:\Batch Files\NPVR-VCD.bat</DaemonToolsExe>

This batch then calls the daemon to do the mount using the parameters NPVR gave it. From there, it just has to call my normal launch script for TMT but with a different drive path now:

Code:

"C:\Program Files\SlySoft\VirtualCloneDrive\Daemon.exe" %1 %2 %3 %4 %5

"D:\BatchRunner\batchrunner.exe" "D:\Batch Files\NPVR-BluRayISO.bat"

Batchrunner is something I wrote to run batch files without the dos window appearing.

NPVR-BluRayISO.bat does a whole bunch of stuff to get ready for running TMT (like killing NPVR), but ultimately it calls the following, where y: is the path to my virtual blu-ray drive.

Code:

start /D"C:\Program Files\Arcsoft\TotalMedia Theatre 3\" /WAIT uMCEDVDPlayer.exe y:

Of course, if you have DVD rips as ISOs (I don't), then this would mean they'd play via TMT too rather than in NPVR, but you could probably work around that.

Iain

[jam_zhou]

Iain,

do you mind sharing batchrunner? Also, how is it different from hiderun?

[imilne]

do you mind sharing batchrunner? Also, how is it different from hiderun?

It's a few lines of Java that just starts the given argument (eg a path to a batch file) as a process, capturing any of its error/output streams along the way. It just means in the case of batch files the dos window never appears. If hiderun does something similar then I'd just stick with that as it'll have no reliance on Java (I've been meaning to rewrite mine in c# for months)...

Iain

[Lao Pan]

Looks as though CHP.EXE (Create Hidden Process - Not Combined Heat & Power) http://www.commandline.co.uk/chp/ could be a good solution to launching batch files silently and it is open source (source code is in the download)

I am just rebuilding Vista on my HTPC after 4 years service (Nasty wreck resizing the C drive, then remembered Acronis had refused the previous time :eek - complete installation is now half the size of the previous SxS folder!

I will give CHP a try and report back.

[Lao Pan]

Have given chp.exe a test and it seems to do what I wanted - runs batch files sillently. Just call chp in a custom task with the full path to the bat file as the argument - that caught me out as I was running chp in the script folder I wasn't putting the full path.