How To: Bluray/HDDVD playback with GBPVR

[whurlston]

To what format does it convert the audio tracks?

[stangdaman]

Whurlston, If you're doing this are you still able to take advantage of Avivo hardware accleration or the Nvidia equivalent? I've never heard that Ffdshow was able to do that. In other words am I going to be adding a lot more load to the CPU on playback this way then I would by just going through PowerDVD?

[whurlston]

You can use the Cyberlink video decoders if you want and still get the same CPU usage. Audio decoding is not hardware accelerated by any decoder. I haven't tested ffdshow's video acceleration but I'm pretty sure it's DXVA2 ccompatible.

[dennit]

To what format does it convert the audio tracks?

There are some threads over at doom9.org with details, but here is what the author said about it last time I looked:

There are two high-def DTS formats - "DTS HD" and "DTS HD MA". Only first is not supported and only because we haven't seen any disc that uses it. Majority of the discs use master audio.

For any HD audio format "supported" means that core audio is extracted and placed to MKV. So for any HD audio MKV will contain regular 5.1 audio, either AC3 or DTS. Currently there is no way to put HD audio into MKV and no player will play it.

Currently unsupported but easy to do once we have a sample disc:
DTS HD (DTS HD master audio is supported)
dolby digital plus (Dolby truehd is supported)

not supported:
blu-ray text subtitles

not implemented yet:
no chapters are extracted from blu-ray
on blu-ray each AV clip is extracted as separate title

Actually, there is a way to get hi-def audio into a MKV container by going to FLAC, which can be sent via HDMI as 7.1 PCM. MakeMKV doesn't support this, but it's a work in progress.
Also, I've heard that the MKV container's latest spec. does allow the HD Audio formats, but nothing plays it - yet. FFDSHOW is supposed to have some beta support for the new audio but I've heard it's not working well.

LPCM is currently not supported, but he's promised it in the future.

[whurlston]

There are some threads over at doom9.org with details, but here is what the author said about it last time I looked:



Actually, there is a way to get hi-def audio into a MKV container by going to FLAC, which can be sent via HDMI as 7.1 PCM. MakeMKV doesn't support this, but it's a work in progress.
Also, I've heard that the MKV container's latest spec. does allow the HD Audio formats, but nothing plays it - yet. FFDSHOW is supposed to have some beta support for the new audio but I've heard it's not working well.

LPCM is currently not supported, but he's promised it in the future.

Ah, I'll stick with my method. I have yet to find a compelling reason to transcode to MKVs. To much time for too little benefit IMO. The DTS Core using libavcodec sounds really good and I get full bitrate TrueHD and I don't need to waste time transcoding since most of the movies I watch are straight from the disc.

[dennit]

Ah, I'll stick with my method. I have yet to find a compelling reason to transcode to MKVs. To much time for too little benefit IMO. The DTS Core using libavcodec sounds really good and I get full bitrate TrueHD and I don't need to waste time transcoding since most of the movies I watch are straight from the disc.

I wasn't trying to get you to switch - just pointing out another option. I started with using AnyDVD and iso's. GBPVR would recognize iso's and I could intercept the call to Daemon, force a mount and play with PowerDVD - exiting to GBPVR. Later I switched to converting to mkv to save space.

MakeMKV offered a (temporarily) free and easy alternative to AnyDVD and MKV conversion. I've been thinking about switching to your method, but haven't gotten around to trying it. (That's why I'm in this thread - just watching your development so I'll be up to speed when I'm ready. I can't get onto 1.3.x yet - constant 0 byte records, so that's my current focus.)

[whurlston]

I understand that some people want to transcode to MKV and I even understand why. I meant my last post as personal commentary and wasn't suggesting that it didn't belong in the thread. MKVs are definitely a viable way to watch Blurays in GBPVR, especially if you are archiving them. You would even be able to watch them directly from the default video library that way.

[stangdaman]

Sorry for the slow response but thanks for the info. It would be really nice to be able to play Blu Ray and HDDVD discs from within GBPVR without having to exit out to PowerDVD. One of these days when I'm not feeling so lazy I'll have to give this a try.

[BigMoose]

It's already possible with Whurlston's plugin. Works very well for me to play bluray disks directly.

[dennit]

It's already possible with Whurlston's plugin. Works very well for me to play bluray disks directly.

To summarize, for my own benefit, I think the BluRay/HDDVD options are as follows (please let me know if I've got this wrong in any respect, as I haven't tried Whurlston's plugin yet):

1) Whurlston's plugin - This plays m2ts (BluRay) and evo (HDDVD) files directly. The files could be on the optical disc and decrypted on the fly by AnyDVD or previously decrypted by AnyDVD to the hard drive. You don't see the menu structure of the disc, but it's really easy - just pop in the disc you want to play - and it's well integrated into GBPVR as a plugin.

2. Store the disc as an iso on the hard drive and launch the iso from the default Video Library - the GBPVR integrated Daemon mounting procedure (intended to launch DVD iso's) can be convinced to launch a bat file that will identify the iso as DVD or hidef disc and mount the iso with Daemon, then play it with PowerDVD. This gives access to the menu structure of the entire disc, but it can be funky and doesn't look particularly pretty as it exits and reenters GBPVR to use PowerDVD. This method takes time to make the iso, and is a major disk space hog to hold the entire disc structure on the hard drive.

3) Convert the movie to mkv and store on the hard drive. There are various ways to do this and it works well, but takes time to do the conversion in advance and lots of disk space, but less than the iso procedure since you don't store the extras. This method also does not show the menu structure of the disc.

(If this summary does not belong in this thread, let me know and I'll delete it. I'm thinking that people in this thread have the most knowledge about BluRay in GBPVR and I was wondering if I'd missed any play options.)