XDVD wont work

[mvallevand]

clifford, I don't know exactly what you are trying to do,but If you are just trying to play dvd iso's on you mvp like you mentioned in another post, I think you are making this way too difficult. Also if you are cliff who posted on the mvpmc forum you haven't responded to any of the posts so that doesn't help. As I mentioned to that cliff, the key to mvpmc/vlc integration Step 1 is loading a working dongle.bin.config file and that should be your focus

The other steps are

- creating shares on C Drive that mvpmc can see
- mounting them to exactly to same named folder in the mvpmc file system
- starting vlc. To start it is as simple as vlc -I Telnet

Martin

[clifford]

Hi Martin.

Yes - same cliff; I've tried to go the xdvd route, because i worked with the mvpmc for awhile, and it seemed more difficult to get it to work than xdvd, if xdvd delivers what I hope for. it seems there are two ways to get dvds to play; one is through mvpmc, and one is through the xdvd plugin. all things being equal, i'd probably prefer playing them through xdvd because everything else i use is through gbpvr. Having said that, i'm ok with either option, but for now i abandoned the mvpmc because setting up the dongle correctly just seemed too flaky. If you believe that mvpmc is the way to go, i'll try that again, but it may be frustrating for you or others to help me because the dongle config file is fairly cryptic to me, and it may take several iterations to get that right.

[mvallevand]

Ok, now that I understand that you have given up on mvpmc, I understand better. Both methods use dvdsimple so you should get similar results anyway.


Martin

[hasso]

d) modified the settings.xml to point to the proper paths etc

I do not believe that this works anymore with the latest version of GBPVR. The settings are hardcoded within XDVD, and changing the paths in settings.xml has no effect, at least with me. The default DVD drive letter setting is "D". If your DVD drive is not "D", then I don't think it'll playback your DVDs through XDVD and the MVP.
I have my .iso files on a separate drive. The default setting for file location in XDVD is the C drive, so it seems to be able to play .iso files only if they are located on the C drive. I got around that by mapping the drive containing my .iso files to a folder on the C drive (as opposed to mapping it to a drive letter).

[clifford]

Martin; Hasso - thanks for your replies.

Martin: I appreciate all the time you've taken to respond to my emails. It's possible that I might have to go back to the mvpmc route if xdvd won't work (in general) as Hasso suggests. Regardless - i appreciate the time you've taken to try to answer my questions. I'll wait a couple of days to see if i can get xdvd to work, but if not, I'll probably insert a post in the dongle forum with my config questions, and hopefully you and the others can help me out there.

Hasso; I'm not too concerned about playing dvds from the drive itself, so if it's hard coded as D (mine is E) that's ok; i don't really need that functionality. the files i'm trying to play with xdvd actually ARE on C drive, so that shouldn't be a problem from what you say, although i'm not trying to play an .iso file, i'm trying to play .vob files... can xdvd do either? Basically - what's your feeling; do you think i should continue to try to work with xdvd and get it to work, or should i abandon it? if the former - what other things could i check?

Martin; i have this sneaking suspicion i'll be crawling back to you in the other forum looking for help with the dongle config...

thanks again everyone
cliff

[mvallevand]

No problem cliff, but remember don't expect too much from the iso playback. The mvp is best suited to playing mpeg-2 and this is just another band-aid solution. I've got 3 other different media extenders that really work with iso's and there is no comparison in functionality.

Martin

[hasso]

I've never tried playing .vob files through xDVD, so can't tell you if its supported or not. I just know that .iso files work if they are installed or visible on the C drive. You need to have the xdvd plugin installed in a xDVD folder within the plugin folder (using the patched version as you did), have VLC installed in the default location, and Daemon Tools installed in the default location. This would permit the playing of .iso files through xDVD on the MVP (after of course a bit of a delay while the transcoding started).

[clifford]

alright so the problem probably is that i don't have daemon tools installed. thanks hasso.

Martin; if it's a bandaid solution and it doesn't work that great, then i'll probably not pursue these solutions. I guess i can do one of two things then:

1) get a bigger drive and convert all my vobs to mp2. I've hesitated to do this for two reasons; one, because i want to keep the vobs around, and it's a pile of data i'd then be storing, and 2, because when i've done this in the past with some media converters, they seemed to only be able to convert each .vob separately. Since a dvd has multiple .vobs, i would end up with 6 mp2s. Do you know a way of taking a video_ts folder with all the vob bits, and easily sewing it all together into one mp2? I don't care if there's no menu/chapter capability, but i'd like to be able to hit 'play' and have the thing play from beginning to end.

2) I guess i could try a different media extender. any you'd suggest? I'll probably not go this route but it'd be good to know in case i'm forced to.

cliff

[mvallevand]

cliff, I'm confused again, do you want to play vob or iso files GBPVR should do on the fly transcoding of vob files by default. For media extenders most devices based on Sigma Design chips can play vob and iso files. I've liked the spec of their SMP8634/5 for a while now, and it does perform quite well. It's probably better to ask someone else I'm not a big user of PC based video.

Martin

[clifford]

Fact of the day; people who don't know what they're talking about have a tendency to confuse everyone around them...

Gbpvr transcodes vob files by default, but if you look at a VIDEO_TS folder, you have a bunch of .vobs limited to 1GB. dvds 'stitch' these together, so when you watch a dvd, you don't have to keep stopping and picking the next .vob. so I was hoping to do that directly with GBPVR. (ie find a way to play the 'VIDEO_TS' folder and have GBPVR figure out how to stitch this together for me) if i couldn't do that, the next best thing would be to manually create one big file from all the 1Gb files and then play that on GBPVR. I was attempting to do that by using the windows command "copy /b vob1.vob + vob2.vob outputfile.mpg but the resulting outputfile.mpg had the audio and video out of sync. i then tried playing just the original vob1.vob file through gbpvr, and i also tried changing the file name from vob1.vob to vob1.mpg before playing, but in either case, even without merging any files together, the individual 1 GB .vob files had problems on gbpvr as the audio/video were out of sync. So I guess, long and the short; all these posts are just me trying to find the easiest way to get a VIDEO_TS folder of vob files to play (with the audio and video in sync) on the GBPVR as a single unit. If there's a small manual conversion step i have to do (such as the window command above) to connect them, that's fine, but i haven't found a way that will actually play these things with the audio/video syncronized.

Does that make sense or am i still sounding like a raving lunatic?