pyTivo Discussion Forum

[lrhorer]

I have a DVD rip which won't display. I'm including the IFOs. PowerDVD plays the video just fine from the hard drive. Hopefully this time it isn't an error of mine.

[TheBayer]

[TheBayer]

[lrhorer]

[lrhorer]

[shutterfriend]

Just an FYI that the setting fast_index does not exist and you need to set fast_listing = true to make this feature setting work

[TheBayer]

[lrhorer]

I know this is probably not a high priority for you, but when you get a chance, you might take a look at the enclosed .ifo files. This is an example where there are zero length (in time) titles which get excluded from the scan by the plug-in, but the titles have sub-titles that are definitely of interest. In this case, for example, the "Extra Features" menu has seven items in it, only one of which is a video. The rest are sub-menus each containing two or more videos themselves. Although these videos are of interest to me, they don't show up in the NPL.

[TheBayer]

[lrhorer]

The latter is fine if it is easier for you. Once you put in the ability to have a metafile control the title names, it's probably moot in any case.

[TheBayer]

[lrhorer]

Well, maybe I'm making too many assumptions. If you are thinking of actually providing a sub-menu, or some significant distinction between the parent title and its children, then it might not be a moot decision from the user's perspective. Say, for example, you were intending to do something like:

[TheBayer]

None of these were what I was going to do. What you keep calling "Sub-titles" are effectively chapters within a non-contiguous title. I was just going to concatenate all of the chapters together and have it available as a single title (which it really is). Having sub menus etc would require a much more complicated "virtual file system" that would require a fair bit of rewriting and work. I believe for the most part these types of titles are used for where you say have a bunch of deleted scenes and you want to play one of them or all of them. However I never want to just play one of them, I wonder if anyone really does.

[lrhorer]

Um well, really not, or not in this case, anyway. I mean, I am sure they are arranged physically as non-contiguous chapters in a single title, but logically they are not all the same sort of thing. In the sample DVD I sent you, There are 4 selections in the top menu: Language, Scene Selection, Extra Features, and Play. The Scene Selection section is, I believe, as you say, both physically and logically. However, the Extra Features (and similar ones in other DVDs) are not. Selecting the Extra Features title / menu brings up a selection of seven titles plus a "Main Menu" title for returning to the main menu, oddly enough. I understand the distinction between a "Title" and a "Chapter" in the physical sense, but I continue to refer to the units below as "sub-titles", because that is how they are presented to the viewer when browsing the DVD.

The first title is a 36 minute film which your software serves up to the TiVo.

The second title brings up an additional menu of 5 sub-titles pointing to individual promotional movie trailers, each between 30 seconds and 2 minutes 40 seconds in length. The sixth sub-title returns to the Extra Features menu.

The third title brings up a menu with three sub-titles pointing to promotional TV spots of 10, 30, and 60 seconds, plus once again the return sub-title.

The fourth title brings up menu with a list of 7 deleted scenes, each typically a couple of minutes or so long, and the return sub-title.

The fifth brings up menu with a pair of interviews by a Mexican radio station, one of Marty Feldman and another of Cloris Leachman and Gene Wilder, and the return sub-title.

The sixth brings up roughly three minutes of outtakes directly. There are no sub-titles including no return sub-title.

The seventh brings up a menu with 17 slideshows of stills taken during production. Each slideshow is a collection of several 10 second clips. Here there is of course a return sub-title, as well.

Of course not all DVDs have anything nearly this much in their Extra / Special Features bag, but many do to one extent or anther. Omitting them all or even most of them is not really what I would want, but by the same token lumping them all together in a chapter-less mass results in a rather tiresome 30 or 40 minute, rambling video. I don't usually play "just one" as it were, but I usually select a specific number to play based upon their specific content. For example, the outtake or "bloopers" reel in this paricular DVD is not as funny as one might have expected from a rib-tickler film like this, but the Mexican interviews are extremely charming. The trailers are OK taken in small doses, but I would not prefer to have to either watch them all or fast-forward through them every time I wanted to view the Extra Features.

[lrhorer]

While I am copying a DVD to the DVD share, pyTivo quits listing the contents of the folder at some point when I scroll down the screen a couple of times and then claims the entire share is empty. So, for example, while I am copying a DVD to the directory called "MARKOF_ZORRO", which happens to be the 29th directory in the alphabetical directory listing, the first two screens show just fine, but when I hit <PgDn> a second or third time, the listing disappears and the TiVo complains "The DVD PC Has no Recordings..." If I go into the webserver and drill into the DVD share, the server returns a blank page. Here is an example of the error: