[toover]

Brand new install of Leopard on a maxed out (2.x ghz / 2 GB) mac mini.

No other programs running.

Brand new install of XBMC "Atlantis" 8.10.

Nothing special, no weird settings, no modifications.

I browse to a wired, gigE connected SMB share. I double-click a DVD ISO file.

Here's where it gets weird ... all FF/REW operations while watching are just completely broken. For instance, if I play the video and press '>' once, it works as expected. Then I press it a second time and it works ... but the sound goes away.

Also, [] and {} key mappings are all backwards ... '[' goes forward and ']' goes backwards.

Remember, this is just a plain old DVD ISO ... very, very computationally easy stuff. It's nothing. Very low bandwidth too, not that it matters on a wired gigE connection.

So, seriously - I must be doing something wrong ... right ? Because how could major, major problems with even the simplest playback of a very common format be completely broken ?

It must be user error - there is no other explanation. So, could someone point out what my user error is ?

Thanks.

[davilla]

There are issues with DVD ISO files. It's being looked into. There is no ETA for fixes.

[toover]

Oh, ok.

It never once occurred to me that this was XBMCs fault ... I was sure it had to be my own error.

It's so odd - I feel like I was doing DVD playback perfectly on my xbox with XBMC four years ago ...

And I also thought I was doing DVD playback perfectly with OSXBMC over a year ago.

I must have a really bad memory, yes ?

[davilla]

Oh, ok.

It never once occurred to me that this was XBMCs fault ... I was sure it had to be my own error.

It's so odd - I feel like I was doing DVD playback perfectly on my xbox with XBMC four years ago ...

And I also thought I was doing DVD playback perfectly with OSXBMC over a year ago.

I must have a really bad memory, yes ?

Maybe, maybe not Just because something works on another platform or worked a year ago does not mean that it's working today. SVN commits can churn a lot of code, things break and get fixed. That's life

[toover]

Maybe, maybe not Just because something works on another platform or worked a year ago does not mean that it's working today. SVN commits can churn a lot of code, things break and get fixed. That's life

Yeah. But there was a lot of fanfare about this new 8.10 release, so it is surprising to see it actually go _backwards_ in featureset. Backwards from 2004, that is.

I'm sure there are a lot of gee-whiz features in 8.X ... not really important, though, if the core functionality is allowed to drift/rot.

I guess the DVD spec does change a lot, though, doesn't it ? Oh wait ...

[davilla]

Yeah. But there was a lot of fanfare about this new 8.10 release, so it is surprising to see it actually go _backwards_ in featureset. Backwards from 2004, that is.

I'm sure there are a lot of gee-whiz features in 8.X ... not really important, though, if the core functionality is allowed to drift/rot.

I guess the DVD spec does change a lot, though, doesn't it ? Oh wait ...

Let's see, three platforms were added from 2004, linux, osx and windows. All of which work in very different ways regarding DVDs.

Unless you actually contribute to the source code development of XBMC for XXXX, it's a simplistic view to think of things like core functionality not changing over time. Couple that with platform OS changes over time and it's not an easy situation. But rest assured that DVD/ISO issues will be resolved under OSX platform. I'm working in that area right now.

[toover]

Maybe, maybe not Just because something works on another platform or worked a year ago does not mean that it's working today. SVN commits can churn a lot of code, things break and get fixed. That's life

Ok. I have a lot of anger about this, mainly because I have, over the course of _six years_ built up a media library that is based around the functions of XBMC. This was not a trivial task, and it involved many hours of ripping, organizing and configuring - NOT TO MENTION instructing friends and family members how to use it.

BUT, I am going to set that aside and try to discuss this in a more constructive way.

The way I see it, there are two major problems here:

1. The specific error of lumping dvd iso playback into a second tier of functions. It is obvious this has happened, because otherwise you wouldn't be releasing major milestone versions without it.

I am here to tell you that for every one of your cool kiddies here on the forums day in and day out, drooling over the latest MKV oddity that has come over the torrents, there is at least one (or more) silent users out in the world doing ery boring, humdrum things with XBMC - and as I pointed out above, investing a non-trivial amount of time and effort to work as END USERS of your application.

The bottom line is, DVD ISO playback is core, core, core. Just because it isn't sexy and fun like this weeks newest h.264 speedup in ffmpeg doesn't mean there aren't many, many actual adults using it as the basis of their entire usage of XBMC. DVD ISO is key. It is not secondary. It is a core function of the app. The end.


2. The other major problem here, and an even more serious one, is the post I have quoted above. The idea that things that used to work can stop working in the future and "that's life" is not OK. Of course there can be bugs, but if you have a major release, you need to make sure that the things that used to work continue to work today.

So never mind if you agree with me or not about DVD ISO playback being absolutely crucial (dear god I hope you do) but in a bigger picture, you just can't go backwards in format support. People invest a lot of time and effort in shaping their media and fileservers and networks around _your tool_ and you can't just break their life by forgetting to test JPEG support one week.


Please, please make DVD ISOs work. OSXBMC had them working a few years ago (before that project just turned itself into a total mess) - can't you just use their old code ?

And then the second plea is, once it _does work_ please don't have the attitude that breaking it later in a major release is "just life". Breaking some weird RSS feed thingy is "just life", but not playing back standard, core formats is not.

Thanks.

[toover]

edit.

[davilla]

Try an recent svn build. DVD iso playback is much better now. CSS decoding is an issue, it was never handled properly from day one. There's an update to dvdnav/dvdcss planned in a few days that will resolve this issue.

As for your other comments, to be honest, I'm just going to ignore them. All functions are important but XBMC is a major project with 20-30 devs working on various different aspects. Breakage can and does happen and sometimes we don't see this breakage until a user runs into it. Unless you have programmed under a large project such as this, you will never understand why this happens so I'm not going to try and explain it in details.

Get over your anger, file a ticket, include a sample with detailed info as to how to reproduce the error/issue and it will get addressed.

[toover]

As for your other comments, to be honest, I'm just going to ignore them. All functions are important but XBMC is a major project with 20-30 devs working on various different aspects. Breakage can and does happen and sometimes we don't see this breakage until a user runs into it. Unless you have programmed under a large project such as this, you will never understand why this happens so I'm not going to try and explain it in details.

That's not quite fair ...

I was not complaining about the fact that software has bugs. Of course it does. I fully expect every single release to have problems and am perfectly happy to participate in reporting/diagnosing them.

My problem is when the "bugs" disable major headline features.

There was never a version of MS Word that couldn't "save as" or a version of IE that couldn't display HTML tables.

So maybe you disagree with me over whether DVD ISO specifically is a major headline feature. If you do, please pick any other feature that in YOUR opinion is a bedrock, and I would suggest that that feature is something that is unacceptable to have disabled in any release of any kind.

That's my point.

[jmarshall]

Provide an ISO that doesn't work to developers so that we can reproduce.

I personally use hundreds of VIDEO_TS folders, and they work just fine, so I'm quite frankly surprised if ISOs of those dvd's would not work.

Obviously dvd playback itself (in OS X) still needs remedying - as davilla pointed out, he's planning on getting that fixed in the coming week.

Cheers,
Jonathan

[davilla]

Dev A makes a change to dvdplayer source to fix XXX play back. Dev B makes a change to file path handling. Dev A and Dev B test their changes but known to them their combined changes just blew up DVD ISO handling because they don't have DVD ISO content to test under.

The change sticks in svn for many cycles because a) no one tested DVD ISO handling and b) users don't build from svn (generally). Months pass with many thousand svn commits. Later someone tests the svn build and DVD ISO handling is broke, everyone goes WFT?

We asked for user testing before the 8.10 release. There's lot's of things to test and we cannot test every function AND fix reported issues. DVD ISO testing fell thought the cracks because not one person (dev or user) did any testing and reported the problem.

Notice I keep mentioning testing. We devs do some standard testing but we can not test everything or we have no time left for development/bug fixing. We rely greatly on user testing to uncover things we miss. There's a 3rd party build avaliable for OSX and nightly builds are coming to get closer to current svn.

I already fixed one DVD ISO issue. A user had a problem that I could not reproduce. They then downloaded an entire DVD ISO to a private ftp server so I could reproduce the problem. A week later, problem fixed.

[garyi]

Bloody hell how much did you pay for this software Toover?

[toover]

Provide an ISO that doesn't work to developers so that we can reproduce.

I personally use hundreds of VIDEO_TS folders, and they work just fine, so I'm quite frankly surprised if ISOs of those dvd's would not work.

Yes, I also was very surprised that the same ISOs that produced working video_ts folders were breaking as ISOs. Agreed.

It has been confirmed in this thread, however, that there are indeed problems with DVD ISOs.

I am trying to encourage DVD ISO playback to be considered a core piece of functionality that the developers themselves check off on a list before a release is made gold.

That's all. It's just a plea to change the status of DVD ISO from "weird thing that I don't use so who cares" to "feature that a lot of real people really use and have built their entire home playback infrastructure around".

[jmarshall]

Without an ISO that doesn't work, that's gonna be a bit tricky. Provide an example and it _will_ be looked into.