Sometimes the Vero when selecting a DVD.iso with Menus will produce a loud audible pop then the sound begins to play. Rather than displaying video a small Black Box camera icon in the lower left will appear.
All of my TV series are stored as DVD.ISO with Menus. The problem is inconsistent with some discs and always occurs with others. For example, my Wife’s Desperate Housewives DVD.Iso never plays on the Vero. (Woe to him who giveth not his pregnant wife her DH).
I have confirmed the file plays fine on OSMC Pi B2, OSMC PI B+, Android Phone KODI 15.2, Windows KODI 15.2.
Bump — about to head off for a long business trip. Anything I can provide to help solve this before I leave the WAF at home? Will probably swap back to the PI B2 before I leave so that she can watch her DH rather than digging through the crawl to find the original boxed dvds.
(DVD.ISO movies that do NOT contain menus finally play well - thanks guys)
Sorry for the late reply – I have been watching this thread, but it’s been a very busy month.
Your point about menus makes sense. We are hardware decoding them with the old renderer. This makes it hard to get ‘still frames’ (menus are often individual frames) out of the decoder because of how Kodi’s ‘dvdplayer’ is designed. On Raspberry Pi this is achieved with a hack: @popcornmix keeps ‘poking’ the decoder to get a still frame out. I had a chat with him about if the same thing can be done on i.MX6 with Vero but he agreed it would be tricky.
I’m not sure to what extent the ARM on the Vero can access the video buffer. I’ll have a think about this one – perhaps the easiest solution is to use SW decode for the menus (quality is not as important there), and hardware for the video proper.
This is easy enough for me to replicate, so I won’t need logs or samples for this
@sam_nazarko I did not realize that other versions running kodi had to hack the menu’s in. They have worked so well for so long… and I began transitioning TV dvd series after my movie dvd collection was transferred that I likely missed the earlier rough times.
For what it is worth, Geexbox on the Cubox-i4 pro renders the menus OK… perhaps something can be shared from that code base? With the latest updates to OSMC the interface is far snappier (and sexier) on the Vero than Geexbox using confluence. It is also far snappier than pi B+… but about on-par with the pi2.
Looking forward to your solution on this one Sam
I also look forward to replacing Geexbox with OSMC on my i4
(also looking forward to Netflix / Amazon streaming at some point in the future… wink)
It depends: on Raspberry Pi, you have this nice hack to get it working as expected:
From 6ee9930d71f7878f13a27b677b78b2d6b38d95e1 Mon Sep 17 00:00:00 2001
From: popcornmix <popcornmix@gmail.com>
Date: Mon, 24 Nov 2014 22:07:25 +0000
Subject: [PATCH 020/103] [dvdplayervideo] Prod decoder when in stills mode
An asynchronous hardware decoder doesn't only produce output pictures when new packets arrive.
In dvd stills mode give it a chance to return pictures that weren't ready when frame was decoded.
What Kodi version is your Geexbox version on? There have been render changes in v14 and v15 which separate GUI and Video. This will cause speed improvements, and better deinterlacing, but will change DVD behaviour. If you were not interesting in deinterlacing, then v13.1 probably is the best build.
Usable via Android, but remote doesn’t work reliably.
re Geexbox version … weird tale. Did some testing before jumping on an airplane. All appeared to be KODI (CEC, Confluence skin, ETC) but the build was from the 13.x range! So I wiped the card using gparted and installed a recent XBMC/14.x, tested, wiped the card and installed KODI 15.2 from the 11/12/2015 build, tested again. In each case after setting up the share (after a LONG LONG LONG boot with an icky set of boot screens) SMB/DVD.iso both with and without menus play fine on all versions (13.x, 14.x 15.2) [Edit, should have said 15.2]. No need to manually turn off deinterlacing (it is set to auto) and the dvd menus come right up. Note that I am sticking to OSMC over the i4 at this point due to the lovely interface Also… the update process is horrible when compared to OSMC!
re Vero, why would I care about deinterlacing when it causes so many problems in rendering DVD.ISOs?
re Netflix/Amazon — anychance this will be integrated into Vero base at some point? I know Netflix works well on Ubuntu derivatives … I would think that Debian Jessie + Chrome binaries would allow integration… not that simple? Not going to talk the WAF into swapping SD cards for cloud streaming… and she wouldnt be so happy with a bugged out remote (have an annoying Amazon Fire TV she can use for now…)
Now that the Vero 1 has ALMOST replaced the Pi for our streaming (DVD Iso)… will the Vero 2 be able to play DVD ISO with Menus like the Pi does? Alternatively, any ideas yet for poking the Vero 1 like you do the Pi?
The Vero 2 should do it just fine, but I’d also like to get this working properly on the Vero 1. I’ll have a think about the best approach for this and see what can be done.
