[Cinephilia]

Now with the last batch of titles, my real problems begin.

A Christmas Carol (1938) [BDMV Folder] [Warner Bros.]

Upon starting playback of the disc, all I am presented with is the BD-J Menu backdrop. This would be very irritating to the average user.

Unfortunately, you cannot bring up the disc menu by hitting the menu button as would be expected. You must use the right arrow key. What about that?

Finally, here lies my real trouble. No playback control works at all, except the stop button. As you can see, the pause button is not even displayed on the OSD. Seeking doesn't work, and the running time at the bottom is wrong. Instead of showing how many minutes you are into the movie next to the total running time, it shows the time passed since you started playback from within Kodi. This also includes the time you spent in the disc menu. Extremely irritating! The only control that works is the BD-J pop-up menu.

The playback behavior is exactly the same for the following two titles.

Christmas in Connecticut (1945) [BDMV Folder] [Warner Bros.]




The Bishop's Wife (1947) [BDMV Folder] [Warner Bros.]





Note how the most problematic titles are from Warner Bros. and use the exact same menu style and structure. Can the studio really be the problem here? The titles play fine in VLC. If you can give me any hint as to what might cause these problems, it would be very much appreciated. What could I be missing here? You said Kodi can even control complex discs, so how can the very basic menus of Warner discs throw it off completely?

If you see a proper chapter count this means Kodi is controlling the disc. so everything you press on the OSD kodi buttons should work.

If it show as zero, this means you need to control with the bluray java menu.

Do you have any idea why this rule doesn't apply to so many of my titles? Apart from the Warner discs that don't work at all, and the VCI disk, all other discs (Universal, Paramount, Fox) show a chapter count of zero, and I can still control playback from the OSD, except chapter skipping. How odd is that?

[fandangos]

Quite extensive testing you did there.

When I looked into this I couldn't figure out exactly why chapters turn zero.
There's a state m_menu this if true is controlling the disc menu.
If false kodi is controlling the playback.

See this commit:
https://github.com/xbmc/xbmc/commit/42b0...b13c9751f4

Actually when Kodi changes the m_menu state it changes some internal player that I couldn't figure out.
Forcing staying as it is crashed.

So I did a simple solution, the video menu would change the state of m_menu.

Pressing it will change whatever state it is. If it's true becomes false and back.

But see that this is only true for matrix builds. This is not part of leia.

Also libbluray has tons of upgrades from 1.0.2 on Leia and 1.2.1 on Matrix.
So I would say if you consider using full discs go with Matrix.

But I think you did all that.

So my last advice is, for ISO or BDMV use Jriver as external player.
If yoj feel like going this route I believe I have some xml settings ready to use it.

Oh, and talking about warner movies, The Shining UHD BD has this exactly kind of menus and I used it a lot for testing, even when fixing the green screen with Dolby Vision.

If I'm not mistaken, memory not the best here, M is the key to change the menu control.

[Cinephilia]

I swear I tested in between Matrix! Must have done something wrong. Perhaps I manually copied over the libbluray 1.1.1 files you compiled back in 2019, overwriting the more current ones that come pre-packaged with Matrix.

Anyhow, I can confirm that your trick indeed works on Matrix! I can now toggle between OSD and BD-J menus by pressing the menu button (Ctrl+Shift+M). Splendid job you did there. This works very well with all of the titles I listed in my earlier post - except, of course, the ones from Warner. Still no playback controls there whatsoever. Somebody at that studio must hate my guts.

So you think JRiver can handle them and would recommend it? Incidentally, what are you using yourself?

[fandangos]

You don't need to copy anything.
Libbluray was updated with Matrix.


Try any of this builds before going Jriver:
https://mirrors.kodi.tv/nightlies/windows/win64/master/

And yes, Jriver plays full bds and uhs bds perfectly but there's a big *...
It has to be in full disc mode, which external subtitles and a few other things don't work.
It basically changes from title playback to full disc playback and to do this you need to restart playing the disc.

That's basically what kodi is doing with m_menu switching.

And the main reason I don't use it, it has the worst user interface I ever seen.
Theater mode doesn't come close to the Kodi UI.

I would say, have Jriver installed for problematic discs and use it as a secondary player.
You can even choose from Kodi library holding enter (return) and it will show which player to use if it's in playercoreconfig xml.

[Cinephilia]

Unfortunately the problem persists on latest nightly. Furthermore, upon testing a few more discs I noticed that on at least one occasion it would play a foreign track which I couldn't switch, neither from the OSD nor from the disc menu. I could enable subtitles though. Very strange.

So I guess there's nothing more I can do, it has to have something to do with the individual titles and not with Kodi. On the bright side, I have encountered the first couple of Warner discs that play perfectly. A Christmas Story, an older release with only a pop-up menu, and Little Shop of Horrors which does use the new basic menu. There seems to be no method to this madness.

I didn't know you can choose the player right from within Kodi! Thanks for pointing this feature out to me, I guess that would be the best compromise then. As for JRiver, I've often read about it but never gotten to checking it out. I'm curios about it.

Thanks so much for all the help. I guess there really aren't many users left who store full disc copies. We're a dying breed, like the cowboys at the turn of the last century.

[fandangos]

I didn't know you can choose the player right from within Kodi! Thanks for pointing this feature out to me, I guess that would be the best compromise then. As for JRiver, I've often read about it but never gotten to checking it out. I'm curios about it.

You need to set it in playercorefactory.xml

Here's an example:

<playercorefactory>
<players>
<player name="Media Center 25" type="ExternalPlayer" audio="false" video="true">
<filename>C:\Program Files\J River\Media Center 25\MC25.exe</filename>
<args>"{0}"</args>
<hidexbmc>true</hidexbmc>
<hideconsole>false</hideconsole>
<warpcursor>true</warpcursor>
</player>
</players>
<rules action="prepend">
<rule name="Blu-Ray" protocols="bd" player="Media Center 25"/>
</rules>
</playercorefactory>

If you remove the rules you will be able to play using Jriver by holding enter and selecting it. 

If you feel like experimenting I used to do this for ISOs

<playercorefactory>
<players>
<player name="MC26" type="ExternalPlayer" audio="false" video="true">
<filename>C:\Program Files\J River\Media Center 26\MC26.exe</filename>
<args>"{1}"</args>
<hidexbmc>false</hidexbmc>
<hideconsole>false</hideconsole>
<warpcursor>false</warpcursor>
</player>
<player name="ISO" type="ExternalPlayer" audio="false" video="true">
<filename>G:\Kodi-TEST\Kodi\mount.bat</filename>
<args></args>
<hidexbmc>false</hidexbmc>
<hideconsole>false</hideconsole>
<warpcursor>false</warpcursor>
</player>
</players>
  <rules action="overwrite">
    <rule filetypes="mkv|mp4|bdmv|bluray|dvd|mpeg|mpls|cpli|avi|ifo|ts|avi|dvix|flv|mpg|mts|vob|mov|mp4|m2ts" player="MC26"/>
    <rule filename="*.iso" player="ISO"/>
    <rule filename="*.mds" player="ISO"/>
     </rules>
</playercorefactory>

or launch the ISO already mounted for Jriver:

"c:\Program Files (x86)\WinCDEmu\batchmnt64.exe" /unmountall &
"c:\Program Files (x86)\WinCDEmu\batchmnt64.exe" %1 L: /wait
start "" "c:\Program Files\J River\Media Center 26\Media Center 26.exe" /Bluray L:

Like so.
I was using WinCDEmu to mount it before launching JRiver

[Cinephilia]

Sorry for my late reply. I did a lot of testing and thinking over the last couple of days, and I've decided that I will go the route you recommended. Thanks a lot for the great insights, and all the advice! You have been most helpful.

I have been using Windows Media Center for almost 10 years, and the time has come to move on. It has been very hard to keep it together and working for all my media. Last month several discs stopped playing for me in the MCE plugin of ArcSoft TotalMedia Theatre, which was the ultimate reason for me to find a more reliable solution going forward. Kodi is wonderful, plays everything and has brilliant community support. There's only one thing I wish it would do better: Displaying Blu-ray collections. I use a brilliant software to organize my disc collection called My Movies from Binnerup Consult. It lets me browse all of my ripped discs with gorgeous cover scans on Windows Media Center. The My Movies program has an option to store NFO files and artwork in a format that Kodi recognizes. That all worked well, but unfortunately I couldn't find a skin that would display the imported cover art with the correct dimensions in Kodi. Blu-ray disc covers are wider than DVD covers and movie posters, and Kodi would always display them either stretched or cropped to make them fit into the poster frame. The way My Movies handles the size difference for Windows Media Center is adding blue bars at the top and bottom of the cover. I've searched for hours, but I guess there is no way to make Kodi display the Blu-ray covers in the correct aspect ratio, or is there?

Forgot to wish you a happy new year!

[jjd-uk]

The way My Movies handles the size difference for Windows Media Center is adding blue bars at the top and bottom of the cover. I've searched for hours, but I guess there is no way to make Kodi display the Blu-ray covers in the correct aspect ratio, or is there?

Do you know where My Movies gets the covers from? just wondering what these covers look like. If none of the skins supports the covers you use "out of the box" then if the covers come from a freely available online source it maybe possible to add support to whatever skin you use by asking the author, or you can modify the skin xml files yourself. Going by the above screenshots you appear to be using Estuary, so perhaps it's just that which isn't optimised for the type of cover art you have, so maybe check out some other skins.

[tjay260476]

@jjd-uk from what I remember of 'My Movies' in my Windows MCE days, they were simply scans that were uploaded by the users, as I seem to remember to get the info for each disc, you'd type the barcode of said disc into the program. - I'm wondering if it's closed source. However - there is this thread on using My Movies within Kodi if that helps to keep covers https://forum.kodi.tv/showthread.php?tid=330918

[Cinephilia]

Thanks for getting back you guys. My Movies is definitely closed source. It has an API, but you need 2500 points to access it. You can either buy the points, or contribute to the My Movies database. @tjay260476 is remembering correctly, that the database consists of scans uploaded by the users. I'm confident to say it's the largest and highest quality database for DVDs and Blu-rays. Sadly the user base seems to have dwindled down significantly after M$ announced their abandonment of WMC.

I've studied the linkted thread, thank you. As you can see in his screenshot, he mostly uses generic movie posters as covers (probably from TMDb). Only a few of his titles in his screenshot are disc covers, namely 'Final Cut' (you can see the UK rating certification in the bottom left corner - partly cropped), and 'The Fog of War' (also cropped).

I tested playback extensively on estuary, but then went on to check out more than half a dozen skins (the ones that I find pleasant to the eye). Not a single one displayed the covers correctly. Only in certain situations would they not be stretched or cropped, like in list view.