[mythtv-users] vlc for ISO-files

Stephen Worthington stephen_agent at jsw.gen.nz
Wed Sep 24 18:14:58 UTC 2014


On Wed, 24 Sep 2014 19:54:27 +0200, you wrote:

>On 24.09.2014 19:49, Stephen Worthington wrote:
>> On Wed, 24 Sep 2014 18:26:54 +0200, you wrote:
>>> playing DVDs with the internal player works fine. But playing DVD ISO files
>>> looks garbled. So I would like to use vlc as player for ISO files.
>>> According to http://www.mythtv.org/wiki/VLC I should use
>>>
>>>        vlc file://%s vlc://quit
>>>
>>> But "%s" is replaced by an URL beginning with "myth://". This kind of URL
>>> is not working for vlc. A workaround could be to use a script, that parses
>>> the URL and passes the relevant information to vlc. But for vlc being able
>>> to find the file I think I would need to mount a file share... it is
>>> getting more and more complex.
>>>
>>> How can vlc or the internal player work for ISO files?
>>
>> What version of MythTV are you running?  There have been a number of
>> improvements with the rendering of DVDs recently, so I now no longer
>> have to use mplayer for DVDs any more.  I have mplayer set up to play
>> files mythfrontend will not handle properly, as you are trying to do
>> with vlc, but I am not using storage groups for my video files, so it
>> works fine.  If you are using storage groups, you will need to undo
>> that and go back to using the old direct access to directories for an
>> external program to be able to play a video file.  I am not sure if it
>> is possible to mix storage groups and directories - if so, you could
>> just move only the problematic files to direct directory access.
>
>The correct way is to "just" wrap VLC in a script that takes care of
>making VLC storage group aware... e.g. by serving the content via http
>and converting the myth:// urls, downloading and caching the file, lots
>of options for you to choose from.

Actually, lots of bad options to choose from - they all look like they
would take lots of work.  Having the files in a direct access
directory works well already.

>Or fix the bugs, as support for external players is on its way out.
>(because its generally not needed anymore) So *now* is a good time to
>bring forward stuff that doesn't work with latest fixes/0.27.

A *lot* of older WMV files and some brand new HD ones are the main
problems now.  They will usually play, but if you try to skip forwards
or backwards, you wind up at the beginning of the file again.  They
all play properly with mplayer.  Unfortunately, none of the ones I
have are suitable for uploading as test files.

Everything else I commonly run into seems to have been fixed.  I also
have some ancient MOV files that do not play or only play audio - but
they just as bad with mplayer so they are likely not something
specific to mythfrontend as the WMV problem is.

I would certainly not say that mythfrontend is good enough that the
external player capability can be removed.  Unless 0.28 has fixed the
WMV problem and it has just not been backported to 0.27.

>Regards,
>Karl


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