I have been fighting with XBMC Frodo RC2 on my new HTPC trying to get the Bluray ISO and Bluray disk playback to work with TMT5 in an external player setup like it does on my XBMC Eden desktop. I figured I'd get the basics working before I moved onto enabling PVR functionality and losing what little hair I have left on my head.
At this point to get the external player to work for ISO images I had to change my video default select action from 'play' to 'choose' so that I can pick the 'Play using' option and choose one of the external player names out of a list. At least for Bluray ISO images the default in the 'Play using' list is ISO_Player. On top of that it still comes up with a popup menu to select either a title or the blu-ray menu rather than directly launching TMT5. My Blu-ray drive playback about the same too. I end up picking 'blu-ray menu' from the popup list to continue launching my external program.
Maybe someone can offer some suggestions as to where I'm going wrong with my configuration?
My first question is whether there is some way to disable the popup menu when dealing with Blu-ray source media either in a physical disk format or an ISO file and force it to parse the rules defined in the playercorefactory.xml file first? That way I could go back to having video selection do a 'play' action rather than 'choose'.
Another thing that I have noticed is that when the external player rule is processed and it launches my PlayISO or PlayDisc batch files that TMT5 is not the focused window so you would need to click with the mouse to bring the program to be the active window. XBMC Eden didn't seem to have that type of problem. Is there some way to set the window focus on a program launched from a batch file? I have tried hideconsole set to true rather than false for ISO_Player in my XML file with no luck.
Sometimes launching TMT5 goes into some kind of ping pong launch almost like its waiting for XBMC to release the audio device and fails ultimately returns back to XBMC. Should I put some kind of sleep or wait in my batch file? I noticed one person was workign on putting a ping into one of their scripts to essentially add a 2 second wait before launching their media player program. ping -n 2 -w 1000 127.0.0.1 > nul
Is it recommended to maybe put a second or 2 wait before launching TMT5 into my batch scripts?
Software: XBMC Frodo RC2
OS: Windows 7 Professional 64bit
CPU: I7-3770
Memory: 8GB
Graphics Card: ATI Radeon HD 6770 w/HDMI
Speakers set to 5.1 to match my Denon AVR-791 receiver configuration.
Audio: Directsound HDMI (WASAPI HDMI causes slow video and/or XBMC hang)
Bluray player: TotalMedia Theatre 5 installed at D:\apps\ArcSoft\TotalMedia Theatre 5
ISO Mounter: Virtual CloneDrive
Physical Blu-ray drive: E:
Virtual Clonedrive drive: F:
ATI HDMI Ouput is set to allow applications to take exclusive control and set to give exclusive mode applications priority.
My xml file is a work in progress since I've been experimenting trying to get XBMC not to do the Blu-ray title/menu pick. If I let it do the default player then XBMC plays the ISO image/Blu-Ray rather than processing the external player.
playercorefactory.xml
<playercorefactory>
<players>
<player name="Disc_Player" type="ExternalPlayer" audio="false" video="true">
<filename>C:\Users\mediapc\AppData\Roaming\XBMC\userdata\PlayDisc.bat</filename>
<args>"{1}" /fullscreen /close</args>
<hidexbmc>true</hidexbmc>
<hideconsole>true</hideconsole>
<warpcursor>bottomleft</warpcursor>
</player>
<player name="ISO_Player" type="ExternalPlayer" audio="false" video="true">
<filename>C:\Users\mediapc\AppData\Roaming\XBMC\userdata\PlayISO.bat</filename>
<args>"{1}" /fullscreen /close</args>
<hidexbmc>true</hidexbmc>
<hideconsole>true</hideconsole>
<warpcursor>bottomleft</warpcursor>
</player>
<player name="Universal_Player" type="ExternalPlayer" audio="false" video="true">
<filename>D:\apps\ArcSoft\TotalMedia Theatre 5\uTotalMediaTheatre5.exe</filename>
<args>"{1}" /fullscreen /close</args>
<hidexbmc>true</hidexbmc>
<hideconsole>true</hideconsole>
<warpcursor>bottomleft</warpcursor>
</player>
<player name="BDMV_Player" type="ExternalPlayer" audio="false" video="true">
<filename>C:\Users\mediapc\AppData\Roaming\XBMC\userdata\PlayBDMV.bat</filename>
<args>"{1}"</args>
<hidexbmc>true</hidexbmc>
<hideconsole>true</hideconsole>
<warpcursor>none</warpcursor>
</player>
</players>
<rules action="prepend">
<rule filetypes="iso" player="ISO_Player"/>
<rule filetypes="bd|ifo" player="Disc_Player"/>
<rule filetypes="dvdimage|bdimage" player="ISO_Player"/>
<rule filename=".*bdmv.*" player="BDMV_Player"/>
</rules>
</playercorefactory>
PlayDisc.bat
"D:\app\ArcSoft\TotalMedia Theatre 5\uMCEPlayer5.exe" E:
PlayISO.bat
@
echo off
"C:\Program Files (x86)\Elaborate Bytes\VirtualCloneDrive\vcdmount.exe" /d=0 %1
"D:\apps\ArcSoft\TotalMedia Theatre 5\uMCEPlayer5.exe" F:
"C:\Program Files (x86)\Elaborate Bytes\VirtualCloneDrive\vcdmount.exe" /d=0 /u
PlayBDMV.bat
@
echo off
set pth=%1
set pth=%pth:BDMV\index.bdmv=%
"D:\apps\ArcSoft\TotalMedia Theatre 5\uTotalMediaTheatre5.exe" %pth% exit
I would appreciate any advice on tweaking my xml configs andn scripts. I probably don't need PlayBDMV.bat either since either I play commercial Blu-Ray discs or ISO images a few discs I don't want to wear out.
Thanks!