[jsxbmc]

There is a hack you can use if you are having problems. Use dvdplayer to navigate the menus and start the feature.
Stop, then context menu, and "play using omxplayer". It will offer to resume from where you were and you can play the feature with the generally better behaved omxplayer.

I tried that (after hacking in a mapping for the context menu using Lircmap.xml), but there was no "Play using..." menu. Furthermore, selecting the Resume option simply navigated into the top-level directory, showing the AUDIO_TS/VIDEO_TS structure, not actually playing anything. But that gave me an idea.

A brief switch to omxplayer in advancedsettings.xml shows that omxplayer does indeed play the video much much better - if you can actually get past the menu system into the feature. No stutter, and I'm sure it looks higher quality even ignoring that. Trickplay is still a bit flaky, with unregulated speed and both forward/backwards skips, but again a bit better than dvdplayer I think. It does still suffer from the close-to-end-of-stream blackouts. (Near the end of a video sequence, the picture suddenly goes black for a second or so, then recovers and displays the final little bit of the video just before the end. Audio continues perfectly during this. You notice it mainly on the copyright/studio splashes before the menu, but it does affect the main feature too - if you bother to watch right to the end of the credits. My wild guess is that the end-of-stream notification is overtaking buffered video data, both in the GPU pipe and xbmc-side, and causing the GPU pipe to flush, then when the right timestamp arrives the remaining xbmc-side buffer which wasn't flushed gets passed in, decoded and played. I've no idea whether I've guessed the decode architecture right there though...)

So, switching back to dvdplayer, I played, passed the menu, stopped, navigated down through the top-level directory, into VIDEO_TS, and hit context menu on VIDEO_TS.IFO itself, where there *was* a Play Using... option. First attempt had no resume option though and just started from the beginning and into the menu again. Second attempt I skipped forwards in dvdplayer before stopping, then I did get a resume option, then skip back to 00:00:00 once omxplayer had started.

What a faff! But the resulting playback is good enough that I can probably inflict this on guests this week!

(More so given that the real DVD player is dying a death and now skips all over the place itself...)

Sure, that shouldn't be necessary and I'd like to improve dvdplayer.
What is always useful is samples of files that clearly misbehave. Upload a sample, explain exactly what you press and how it misbehaves and I'll investigate.
I don't tend to watch dvd images. I have a few for testing but they seem to behave pretty well.

I'll try and put a minimal set of files to demonstrate the menu sticking I mentioned earlier - that I've not seen mentioned anywhere else yet. I've just turned on debug logging and during the pause the following gets output: http://xbmclogs.com/show.php?id=234382 . At :24 I played the DVD, at :37 selected the play item from the DVD menu, at :45 the sound cut out, at :56 the screen went blank, at :07 the feature started playing. 30 seconds from click to result.

The dvdplayer stuttering is well attested to, and I get the impression others are hearing the same audio "veeping" I am too, so presumably any old DVD would do if you can rip it to a folder structure. I can probably sort something out if you still need a demo piece though.