DVD Playback idea

[glassvial]

Wasn't sure where to post this, so if it needs to be moved over feel free.

The only way I've seen to get DVD playback working on the Hauppauge PVR350 card is under linux with a hacked version of mplayer. Perhaps some Windows dev's could look into that for a way to port that idea over As it sits right now, I know of no Windows programs that can do it. And also that hacked mplayer for linux doesn't do any hardware decoding acceleration, it just outputs the video through the PVR350. Hope that made some sense...moving on!

My idea is to Y-join (as opposed to a Y-splitter, get it?) the composite TV-Out of the 350 card along with a TV-Out of a standard video card. In theory, you could watch TV through the 350's TV-Out and watch a DVD through the video card's TV-Out. Anyone have any thoughts on this, before I tear everything apart and try it?

Thanks.

[AndyCherry]

The problem with doing this in software is that the Hauppauge hardware decoder can't cope with an encrypted MPEG2 stream that you get from the DVD player.

I've had it working by creating a graph that decodes the MPEG2 stream and then re-encodes it using a software encoder, and then passes it to the Hauppauge hardware decoder which decodes it again(!. It worked but the sound was out of sync with the video by about 5 seconds.

If someone could develop a replacement for the DVD Navigator graph that stripped out the encryption then I think you could get it to work, but you'd probably find yourself never able to go to the US ever again.

The hardware route sounds intriguing, but it can't be that easy (can it?)

Cheers,
Andy

[glassvial]

I wonder how it was done with the hacked mplayer for linux then?

As far as the hardware route, I'm not certain. I plan on testing that theory today and seeing what happens. If it works then it would be as easy (again, in theory) as a plugin for GB to drop the PVR card's overlay, give it back to the TV-Out on a standard video card, let it play the DVD, once that's done switch back to the PVR card again. I hope someone besides me makes sense of this

[sub]

On linux they use the PVR350 OSD display the DVD. The OSD can display 32bit colour so is capable of displaying a decent picture. On Linux the OSD is a little too slow, so playing a DVD is very choppy on most machines. On Windows the OSD way too slow. The windows drivers provide much much slower OSD access. I looked at this option early on, but I'd only be able to get about 5 frames per seconds, so decided it wasn't worth looking at.

[glassvial]

Ah ok that explains it. Nice cheat. Hopefully someday someone will figure it out in Windows, or perhaps Hauppauge will start giving in to demands (hint hint) to include that feature in a future driver release. I'm off to test my theory of joining video signals now. I'll post back when I'm done.

[glassvial]

Oh well so much for that idea. The TV card doesn't completely override the video card as I had hoped (at least not with my NVidia card, can't speak on ATI cards because I don't have one). However there's an easy solution, an A-B switch. While this is a bit inconvenient and does add a bit more expense to a project (not that getting a video card that has TV-Out doesn't) it is doable until someone finds a way to get DVD playback going on the Hauppauge 350 card (come on Hauppauge, make a driver that can do it!

In any event, there's an idea for those that want/need DVD playback. Perhaps there'd be a way to add a button to GB, "DVD" that does nothing more than give a prompt, "Press the button on your switch now" with an OK prompt to go back to the main menu

Hey, it's an idea at least.

[BerkA]

I'm not very familiar with DVD encryption, but here's how I understand it:

The files on DVDs are encrypted with CSS. If you decrypt them in realtime (much like a DVD player), you can feed the output to the hardware MPEG2 decoder.

Look up DeCSS. Note: there used to be some legal stuff around it; so be careful if you decide to go this route.

[AndyCherry]

The decrypting of the DVD is relatively easy - after all, WinDVD, PowerDVD, Sonic Cineplayer etc. do it all the time!

The difficult bit is writing a new DVD Navigator graph that does the decryption so that it can be passed unencrypted to the Hauppauge filter for the PVR350's TV Out (any takers?)

Cheers,
Andy

[dito]

Have you tried using a program called DVDRegionFree ( http://www.afterdawn.com/softwar....ree.cfm )?

I remember I did get an erlier version to work with region2 DVD's on my SS1 (SkyStar1 DVB-S v1.3) card hardware output... So this might work for you too...

Best regards!

[glassvial]

Well, good idea but it didn't work. At least not with WinDVD. I get audio, but no video.

Edit: no dice with PowerDVD either. Unless there's some sort of trick you have to do beforehand to get it to work.