2014-10-27, 11:28
Hi
I thought I'd see how Helix was coming along, so I installed yesterdays nightly build on my RPi (OpenELEC).
I see that more work has been done to the DVDPlayer, and that now there's an option in the playback settings, to automatically choose between OMXPlayer and DVDPlayer. The thing is, whether this option is on or off, there now seems to be no way (using the context menu at least) to select "Play using" as you could before.
Basically most of my film collection consists of my ripped DVDs (as ISOs) and using the RPi many of the DVD menus don't work using the previously default OMXPlayer. DVDPlayer of late seems to now be able to at least display and allow interaction with DVD Menus, but unfortunately the actual MPEG2 playback using DVDPlayer is so choppy and out of sync as the render the films unwatchable!
I see in this announcement (http://xbmc.org/kodi-14-0-helix-nearing-beta-release/) it mentions:
Well, I have to say I can't see any improvement to the playback using DVDPlayer, but maybe I've been using a build with this feature enabled for some time already. Either way, DVDPlayer still can't play the titles well enough to actually watch.
My previous workaround was thus:
Start the film with problematic DVDMenu (most of them!) using DVDPlayer.
Get into the main title and move a little into the film (enough to trigger the "resume from" option on next play, not sure exactly what that is).
Stop the film, then use the context menu to select "Play using" and choose OMXPlayer.
Select resume from the subsequent menu.
Skip back to the start of the film.
Enjoy film (finally)!
With these changes to remove the manual choice of using OMXPlayer for DVDs, and until DVDPlayer is fixed to actually play the files as well as OMXPlayer, all my films are unwatchable again. :-(
Tbh what would be good, until DVDPlayer is fixed would be the option in the video options (the ones you can access during playback) to change player on the fly (in the same way you can choose the scaler, de-interlacing, contrast, etc. on the fly) as it would back my workaround a lot less tedious.
I thought I'd see how Helix was coming along, so I installed yesterdays nightly build on my RPi (OpenELEC).
I see that more work has been done to the DVDPlayer, and that now there's an option in the playback settings, to automatically choose between OMXPlayer and DVDPlayer. The thing is, whether this option is on or off, there now seems to be no way (using the context menu at least) to select "Play using" as you could before.
Basically most of my film collection consists of my ripped DVDs (as ISOs) and using the RPi many of the DVD menus don't work using the previously default OMXPlayer. DVDPlayer of late seems to now be able to at least display and allow interaction with DVD Menus, but unfortunately the actual MPEG2 playback using DVDPlayer is so choppy and out of sync as the render the films unwatchable!
I see in this announcement (http://xbmc.org/kodi-14-0-helix-nearing-beta-release/) it mentions:
Quote:Add MMAL decoder and MMAL renderer for Raspberry Pi
DVDs with menus do not work well with omxplayer (the main R-Pi internal player). For this the R-Pi uses the normal internal player from Kodi which offers better support for software decode for SD codecs like divx3, msmpeg, sorenson spark etc. Also omxplayer doesn’t support alsa, so can’t be used with USB and I2S sound cards. Internal dvdplayer may behave better with dodgy timestamps and packet loss, e.g. with live TV. So for this support was added to dvdplayer using the MMAL api. This offers hardware acceleration, saves the processing cost of YUV->RGB conversion, saves the memory cost of the RGB textures for video frames and allows high quality (cubic) scaling.
Well, I have to say I can't see any improvement to the playback using DVDPlayer, but maybe I've been using a build with this feature enabled for some time already. Either way, DVDPlayer still can't play the titles well enough to actually watch.
My previous workaround was thus:
Start the film with problematic DVDMenu (most of them!) using DVDPlayer.
Get into the main title and move a little into the film (enough to trigger the "resume from" option on next play, not sure exactly what that is).
Stop the film, then use the context menu to select "Play using" and choose OMXPlayer.
Select resume from the subsequent menu.
Skip back to the start of the film.
Enjoy film (finally)!
With these changes to remove the manual choice of using OMXPlayer for DVDs, and until DVDPlayer is fixed to actually play the files as well as OMXPlayer, all my films are unwatchable again. :-(
Tbh what would be good, until DVDPlayer is fixed would be the option in the video options (the ones you can access during playback) to change player on the fly (in the same way you can choose the scaler, de-interlacing, contrast, etc. on the fly) as it would back my workaround a lot less tedious.
