[mythtv-users] Region free DVD player?

[Stephen Worthington]

On Wed, 2 Apr 2014 21:39:55 -0500, you wrote:

>On Wed, Apr 02, 2014 at 05:51:31PM -0400, faginbagin wrote:
>> On 4/2/2014 4:09 PM, Eric Sharkey wrote:
>> > On Wed, Apr 2, 2014 at 3:36 PM, faginbagin <mythtv at hbuus.com> wrote:
>> >> Is use of MythTV as a region free DVD player supported?
>> >>
>> >> If it is, I will be posting an issue I've encountered. If it isn't, I'll keep it to myself.
>> > 
>> > Officially this is not a MythTV issue.  MythTV does not itself support
>> > decryption of encrypted media.  If you're using MythTV with third
>> > party libraries that do provide such things, you should not seek
>> > support for that on this list.  I believe that's the party line here.
>> > 
>> > Eric
>> 
>> Hypothetically speaking:
>> 
>> What if I have done as *I think* jedi suggested, separated the media from the content outside of mythtv and now have content that is not encrypted and plays in vlc and mplayer but not in mythtv? Is discussion on the list still off limits?
>> 
>> What if I figure out and fix the problem? Should I submit a patch or keep it to myself?
>
>    I don't recall any point in time when playing video with a differing frame 
>rate or frame size was any kind of problem on a computer. Computers have pretty
>much always had arbitrary setups likely to not match the local TV standard.
>
>    I play stuff from the other side of the pond all the time. Some of the
>stuff I have is just obscure ethnic material and other stuff is just items that
>are hard to find or expensive in my local region. 

There certainly are some things that will not play in MythFrontend -
especially if you are using VDPAU or VAAPI.  I have a test file here
that does not play properly with full VDPAU:

  http://www.jsw.gen.nz/mythtv/Ondine_clip.mpg
  (49,498,116 bytes)

This is a clip from one of my mother's PAL ballet DVDs.  It plays fine
in mplayer, even when mplayer is using VDPAU.  It does play in
MythFrontend if the decoding is done by the CPU and the rest by VDPAU.
The problem is not something to do with frame rates or frame sizes (it
is a standard DVD format).  I have run across a number of DVDs made
from older source material that have the same problem as this one -
the video just gives occasional flashes of partial valid frames, but
most of the time is just moving coloured blobs on a grey background.

Very old Apple Quicktime .mov files also cause problems, and older
.wmv files will often play but will not be able to skip forward or
backwards (they restart playing at the beginning again if you try to
skip).  The .wmv files play fine in mplayer, but the old .mov files
even defeat it.