DVD playback on MVP

[mvpaaagh]

Hi Sub,
I am currently ripping my kids DVDs to the PC. I have tried running the VOB files through Womble MPEG encoder as outlined in the FAQs but with no success. The audio is always out of sync. To get around this it would be nice if GBPVR could stream DVDs to the MVP. Is this on your to do list? Is it a major undertaking? I know yo're not a fan of server side transcoding. Would this be neccessary when streaming VOB files?
thanks in advance.
mvpaaagh.

[sub]

To be honest, this isn't something I'm intending to do. Things start to get legally "sticky" when you start dealing with DVDs. Legality aside, yes - it would be a huge undertaking.

[aegisx]

Try DvDx, works well for me when ecoding from vob.

[TrevorW]

Try using Canopus Pro-coder II to convert to MPEG2. Works for me.

There is a demo version about if you look in the right place.

[krypton_john]

Quote[/b] (sub @ Sep. 27 2004,16:40)]To be honest, this isn't something I'm intending to do. Things start to get legally "sticky" when you start dealing with DVDs. Legality aside, yes - it would be a huge undertaking.

Sub, I don't think there is any legality issue as long as your code does not attempt to decrypt the CSS. In other words, you could set it up so that it played unencrypted region free or in-region DVDs with no issues as your code is just streaming the output to a display on a different machine to the player. That is no different to running a DVD on a DVD player and playing the output into a TV.

Now if a user decided to implement one of the many transparent DVD decrypters and region code removers that's nothing to do with you!

However this still doesn't take away the underlying work required to just stream the DVD. I'd be super optimistic and hope that someone writes a bit of daemonTools like code that makes a loaded DVD look like an MPEG in the recordings folder. Then this would all work as is, right?

[sub]

Its really just not worth the effort. Effectively writing a DVD player from scratch for the MVP is a big project enough to be its own application. Its nots really the sort of thing I can take on, without dropping everything else. I know I dont have the sort of hours that would be required to take on this sort of project.

[krypton_john]

Oh I totally agree. My point was if there was a utility around that combined daemonTools with a transcoder (not really a transcoder - just a tool to extract mpeg from vob) then you basically wouldn't have to code any changes at all, right?

I guess the hard (infeasible) part is that the transcoder wouldn't know which title on the DVD is the main movie.

[aegisx]

From my reading it all depends on how you use it. If it is just for personal use you can backup the dvd (so long as you keep the orig). However if you use it for commercial purposes/sharing then it gets into legal trouble.

In any case, there probably isnt a reason for gbpvr to do it. More of a pre-gbpvr step

[mvpaaagh]

Thanks for the feedback all. Thanks for the mpeg encoder suggestions. I'll certainly try them. It occurred to me, however, that if GBPVR could see a DVD playing on the server PC as another TV channel then I could view playback on the MVP as a "Live TV" stream. This is where my thinking went a little off the wall. I wondered if I connected the TV Out from my graphics card to the svideo input on my PVR250 could I then tune GBPVR to see DVD playback on the PC as a TV channel? If this worked it might be possible to launch a DVD through the MVP by using a Custom Task. An ugly solution I know but is it feasible? Any thoughts appreciated.

[chongo]

check out this link to a post in developers forum:

Topic: movieDBPlugin first release, please test it!

If I read it correctly vob files can be read by this latest release