SageTV - Blu-Ray Menus...one day down the road?

[Daweeze]

One of the features I like most about SageTV is the fact that DVD's have their menus. I am someone who doesn't rip to MKV and keeps Folder based rips of the original media structure for all of my movies. I like to frequent the extra features from time to time on movies. That said, I don't like the lack of Blu-Ray menus in SageTV. I know that we can work around this with changing titles etc but this to me is the only thing that SageTV doesn't do for me. Seeing that we are way early in the development of v9 changes, I was curious if this might be in the future for consideration for those that are working on any of the misc projects to keep v9 moving forward? I know most people like to rip only the title and compress it as much as possible, but that's not my goal. A while back we talked about this feature before SageTV was sold and it didn't have much steam due to Java requirements and maybe even consideration for licensing needs. Now that Kodi and other products have it, I thought I would bring it up again. My system is exclusively a SageTV Server and 7 HD300 extenders so virtual mounting the image in a full client isn't an option either.

What do you think? (Aside from no need for this because ripping the title only is all you need.)

-Travis

[stanger89]

Don't hold your breath, there is no free/open source solution that provides Blu-ray menus.

[Daweeze]

Originally Posted by stanger89

Don't hold your breath, there is no free/open source solution that provides Blu-ray menus.

I have read that Kodi supports it. Is that not true? I haven't tested myself but I am sure someone here has played with Kodi.

-Travis

[EnterNoEscape]

Originally Posted by Daweeze

I have read that Kodi supports it. Is that not true? I haven't tested myself but I am sure someone here has played with Kodi.

-Travis

To clarify, there is a free open source library that Kodi uses, but the support is far from complete. It's getting better, but it's still a crap shoot on what menus will work.

[Daweeze]

Originally Posted by EnterNoEscape

To clarify, there is a free open source library that Kodi uses, but the support is far from complete. It's getting better, but it's still a crap shoot on what menus will work.

So what you are saying is that you might tackle it when you are done with OpenDCT and the new associated WebUI? Thanks, this is great news.

[EnterNoEscape]

Originally Posted by Daweeze

So what you are saying is that you might tackle it when you are done with OpenDCT and the new associated WebUI? Thanks, this is great news.

Yeah...sure.

[stanger89]

Originally Posted by EnterNoEscape

To clarify, there is a free open source library that Kodi uses, but the support is far from complete. It's getting better, but it's still a crap shoot on what menus will work.

Interesting, they've gotten a lot farther than I thought they had. Last I looked, Blu-ray "menu" support was all faked, or at best for non-java menus, but it sounds like they're making progress. So there is hope.

That said, I find it much more userfriendly to just rip main movie only, or TV shows as individual episodes.

[trk2]

Originally Posted by stanger89

Interesting, they've gotten a lot farther than I thought they had. Last I looked, Blu-ray "menu" support was all faked, or at best for non-java menus, but it sounds like they're making progress. So there is hope.

That said, I find it much more userfriendly to just rip main movie only, or TV shows as individual episodes.

I agree this works for most applications. However, if there are multiple versions of the movie available through seamless branching there is no good method to select which version you want to watch. Sage will select the longest playlist. You can select other playlists but the only information available is the run time. The only other option is to rip the movie multiple times.

And if you are someone who enjoys the additional special features that are bundled with the move (i'm not one of those people) than Sage will not currently meet that need.

[Tiki]

Originally Posted by trk2

I agree this works for most applications. However, if there are multiple versions of the movie available through seamless branching there is no good method to select which version you want to watch. Sage will select the longest playlist. You can select other playlists but the only information available is the run time. The only other option is to rip the movie multiple times.

And if you are someone who enjoys the additional special features that are bundled with the move (i'm not one of those people) than Sage will not currently meet that need.

Have you encountered any issues with the seamless branching in Sage? I used to rip the whole folder structure, but had some Bluerays that would glitch when the "seamless" branches were encountered when I played them back in Sage. For those same disks, if I just converted the main title to MKV, they played back perfectly in Sage.

[trk2]

Originally Posted by Tiki

Have you encountered any issues with the seamless branching in Sage? I used to rip the whole folder structure, but had some Bluerays that would glitch when the "seamless" branches were encountered when I played them back in Sage. For those same disks, if I just converted the main title to MKV, they played back perfectly in Sage.

I've never had Sage glitch on playback with seamless branching, however I remember my DVD player would pause momentarily at the branches. I don't know if it makes a difference, but my Sage playback is all done through extenders. I usually have a preference for most of the movies with seamless branching and if the default playlist isn't the version I want than I just manually delete the playlists until the version I want becomes the default. Aliens would be a good example where I sometimes prefer the theatrical version because of pacing, but sometimes I like the additional scenes of the extended version.

[mistergq]

I am not sure how I feel about this. I see the benefit of this, but I am not sure I would use it. I am in the process of redoing everything to MP4 format as I find that can play on any device besides Sage. Of course, when you have a HD failure where all the DVDs were saved, you reconsider how you do things.

[EnterNoEscape]

I used to have a high preference for having the menus, but the thing that bothers me the most is all the bloat (trailers, lengthy animations, redundant copyright notices) that comes along with the convenience. I ripped all of my Blu-rays and DVD's using MakeMKV and separated the features from extras. If it had both theatrical and directors cut, the directors cut was placed with the extras. I know that's not great from a storage efficiency perspective. I went through all of this because Kodi had a really nice add-in that could integrate the extras with the actual movie so when you selected the movie, the extras were only a click away. I thought it was vastly more convenient than any disc menu could afford me and it's a superior solution if for example you want to queue up a trilogy, since you know it will skip the menus as you go from movie to movie. There were only a few where there was no way to accurately rip everything to videos (built in games, multi-angle video, choose your own destiny). For those, I pulled the main feature as best I could determine and left the entire disc as an extra.

The other reason you might want to extract the main feature instead of keeping the menus is there are some discs that have many playlists that look like they are the main feature, but only one of them is actually correct. All of other ones will play the wrong clip at the wrong time or add content that shouldn't be there. Or in the case of Pixar you could end up with the wrong language on various objects in the movie. Technically with properly functioning menus you shouldn't run into any of this, but that likely won't help if you're trying to stream to a remote placeshifter for example.

I agree with mistergq's sentiment that if my primary and mostly offline backup array failed, I don't know if I'd want to go through that again with my massive collection.