Blu-Ray Playback In SageTV - Yes or No?

[viperdiablo]

"You can drop a Blu-Ray disk in a Blu-Ray player on your SageTV HTPC server and if you have AnyDVD running can play/stream it on your HD200. I do that some - but 5.1 audio only atm." -Brent


So if I go into the hd200 interface select play dvd option the bluray movie on my pc will start up and I will have access to the menu ect? or will it go right into the main movie?

[Brent]

Originally Posted by viperdiablo

"You can drop a Blu-Ray disk in a Blu-Ray player on your SageTV HTPC server and if you have AnyDVD running can play/stream it on your HD200. I do that some - but 5.1 audio only atm." -Brent


So if I go into the hd200 interface select play dvd option the bluray movie on my pc will start up and I will have access to the menu ect? or will it go right into the main movie?

Not quite that easy - but close. You have to add your Blu-Ray drive as an import "folder" - I called mine "DBluRay". Then to play a streamed Blu-ray I go to "videos" and it shows "DBluRay" as one of the imported videos. I just select DBlueRay and it plays that movie streamed from the Blu-Ray drive.

[babgvant]

Originally Posted by stanger89

Maybe, but 100% of Blu-rays are encrypted, it's part of the license for prerecorded content. Working within directshow, I get the impression it's much harder to do things with playback than on the HD200.

Always with the DirectShow hating...

MPC-HC uses DirectShow to "support" (i.e. something similar to what the HD200 does) BDMV playback so it's obviously within the possible. And one of the things I've been thinking about looking at a workaround for (OSS rocks!).

IMO, it's more of an issue of focus; Sage was focused on making the HD200 work because for most of us using the PC for BD playback there are already a couple decent solutions (PDVD/TMT). That said, I'd be surprised if it wasn't on the TODO list.

[viperdiablo]

Sounds pretty simple. So this way you have full menu, chapter support?

[reggie14]

Originally Posted by stanger89

Maybe, but 100% of Blu-rays are encrypted, it's part of the license for prerecorded content. Working within directshow, I get the impression it's much harder to do things with playback than on the HD200.

Right, but if the argument is that all blu-rays are encrypted, so why support unencrypted blu-rays, then we wouldn't have support on the HD200.

Having never done any work in directshow I really don't have a good idea how hard it is to do things in there. It just seems like, at least on some level, adding unencrypted blu-ray support is basically a playlist exercise. The codecs are already handled, and it's my (potentially false) understanding that the container is as well. It's not clear to me what Sage had to implement to get blu-ray working on the HD200, and why they can't do something similar on PC clients.

Personally, I'm mostly done with PC-based clients, so I don't particularly care. But I can understand why someone that's interested in online video would rather have a full PC-based client. So, it seems like support on the software side of things would be valuable.

[Brent]

Originally Posted by viperdiablo

Sounds pretty simple. So this way you have full menu, chapter support?

full menu - no, it just plays the main movie title without menus at the moment although I hope they'll add menu support in future updates. You can switch between different audio tracks.
chapter support - yes

[Fuzzy]

Originally Posted by stanger89

The UI is horrible. Remote support is basically non-existant. Required AnyDVD even though my HW/Drivers should have been fine.

Guess that's where the difference is.. I don't ever see the UI, other than right as it's loading up. Everything is done from my remote. I have AnyDVD-HD, but it isn't loaded unless I decide to rip something, and blu-ray plays back just fine.

Originally Posted by stanger89

Not nearly as good as my BDP-51FD does.

My blu-ray drive only cost me $75. And I get the same movie and menues as your more expensive stand-alone. Besides, that's rather irrelevent to the current discussion, as I think it's assumed anyone can just throw the money at a stand-alone player, and it'll work.

[stanger89]

Originally Posted by babgvant

Always with the DirectShow hating...

No Directshow hating, all I said was it was harder to do in PC Sage's Dshow architecture than on the HD200. I'm not sure how the HD200 does it but they've got all the playback they need and it's probably just a small tweak of the Sage code to read the longest plst file.

In Directshow, I think Sage would need a new file source filter that knows how to read the plst files. Sage doesn't have or make such source filters. For DVD they use (I think) MS's DVD Nav filter, and for everything else, I assume they use one of the other standard file source filters.

I'm guessing you'd agree that building a file source filter is probably harder than bolting plst parsing onto their existing extender file reading codebase. Basically all I was saying was that it seems it was quite easy for them to add the functionality to the HD200, and I'd guess it's a good deal more effort to build the filter(s) necessary to do the same on the PC.

MPC-HC uses DirectShow to "support" (i.e. something similar to what the HD200 does) BDMV playback so it's obviously within the possible. And one of the things I've been thinking about looking at a workaround for (OSS rocks!).

I never said it wasn't possible, just harder. Did MPC make a "BD Nav" filter? If so, then Sage could probably leverage that and have the same functionality on the PC side.

IMO, it's more of an issue of focus; Sage was focused on making the HD200 work because for most of us using the PC for BD playback there are already a couple decent solutions (PDVD/TMT). That said, I'd be surprised if it wasn't on the TODO list.

Me too, all I was getting at above is that it was probably quite easy on the extender due to the way they read/play files, they probably had most of the work done already with their DVD navigator for the extenders. They wouldn't have the same launching point on the PC since they use 3rd party Dshow filters for all media playback.

If they used their own, custom Dshow filters for stuff like DVD nav, I'd guess it would have been similarly easy on the PC.

And then of course there's the issue of "full" support. That's just a massive undertaking wherever you are, getting a full BD-J VM running.... Though the extender might be easier there to if the Sigma chip their using includes a BD-J VM in their SDK or one they could license easily.

[Fuzzy]

Originally Posted by stanger89

No Directshow hating, all I said was it was harder to do in PC Sage's Dshow architecture than on the HD200. I'm not sure how the HD200 does it but they've got all the playback they need and it's probably just a small tweak of the Sage code to read the longest plst file.

In Directshow, I think Sage would need a new file source filter that knows how to read the plst files. Sage doesn't have or make such source filters. For DVD they use (I think) MS's DVD Nav filter, and for everything else, I assume they use one of the other standard file source filters.

No need for a new source filter, they can use the same playlist parsing they use on th extender and simply playback that playlist in sage. Sage already will play back M2TS files just fine, it's just a matter of selecting the right one, by analysing the playlists...

[stanger89]

Originally Posted by Fuzzy

Guess that's where the difference is.. I don't ever see the UI, other than right as it's loading up. Everything is done from my remote.

And I couldn't get a remote to work well with PowerDVD for the life of me. It was basically impossible to find the right targets in girder for all the commands. And then there's stuff like some of the menu commands seemed only available through the "PC" interface, there was no keyboard shortcut for some of them.

My blu-ray drive only cost me $75. And I get the same movie and menues as your more expensive stand-alone. Besides, that's rather irrelevent to the current discussion, as I think it's assumed anyone can just throw the money at a stand-alone player, and it'll work.

Well I rebuilt my whole HTPC (paid more than I later paid for my 51FD) specifically for BD playback. It came with PDVD 7.3, but only stereo audio. So I upgrated to 8 Ultra to get the multichannel audio decoding ($70 or so). I tried TMT because at least that has a 10' UI and I think works better with remotes, but it would not work right on my hardware/software. After like 6 months of fighting it, I finally bagged it and got a standalone and it's been great.

I had flawless DVD playback in Sage with nVidia decoders for years, but I could never get BD flawless.

Standalone for discs and HD200 for rips, it's an awesome combo. And the quality is better to boot.

[stanger89]

Originally Posted by Fuzzy

No need for a new source filter, they can use the same playlist parsing they use on th extender and simply playback that playlist in sage. Sage already will play back M2TS files just fine, it's just a matter of selecting the right one, by analysing the playlists...

It's not the same though, not by a long shot I don't think. Using standard source filters would result in pauses whenever you have to switch m2ts files. And standard source filters don't know about chapters.

Even if it was just chapters, AFAIK right now they just send chapter change commands to the Dshow nav filter, they'd have to bolt additional logic around the dshow playback to intercept the chapter change command and convert them to seek commands.

The HD200 is an entirely different playback engine than on the PC.

[babgvant]

Originally Posted by stanger89

No Directshow hating, all I said was it was harder to do in PC Sage's Dshow architecture than on the HD200. I'm not sure how the HD200 does it but they've got all the playback they need and it's probably just a small tweak of the Sage code to read the longest plst file.

Hard to speculate on how hard it is to work w/ the HD200, but I don't think it would be harder to do w/ DS.

Originally Posted by stanger89

In Directshow, I think Sage would need a new file source filter that knows how to read the plst files. Sage doesn't have or make such source filters. For DVD they use (I think) MS's DVD Nav filter, and for everything

I'm guessing you'd agree that building a file source filter is probably harder than bolting plst parsing onto their existing extender file reading codebase. Basically all I was saying was that it seems it was quite easy for them to add the functionality to the HD200, and I'd guess it's a good deal more effort to build the filter(s) necessary to do the same on the PC.

The easiest thing would be to deal with the plst file outside of DirectShow and treat the file as a M2TS file (that already works) for playback.

For the few discs that have more than one m2ts, use the existing playlist functionality (a tv show can span multiple files).

Originally Posted by stanger89

Me too, all I was getting at above is that it was probably quite easy on the extender due to the way they read/play files, they probably had most of the work done already with their DVD navigator for the extenders. They wouldn't have the same launching point on the PC since they use 3rd party Dshow filters for all media playback.

Personally, I'd be surprised if the source filter part is the sticking point. Sage doesn't ship with a M2TS splitter, so until their demuxer does it there's not much point in taking the [probably small] amount of time necessary to initiate playback from the bdmv.

There may be legal reasons why they don't include more OSS filters in the base install (although since AC3Filter is, maybe not), but it would provide a better OOTB experience if they did ship with a core set of OSS splitter/decoders. We'd all see a lot fewer "how come my mkv doesn't play?" threads...

Originally Posted by stanger89

And then of course there's the issue of "full" support. That's just a massive undertaking wherever you are, getting a full BD-J VM running.... Though the extender might be easier there to if the Sigma chip their using includes a BD-J VM in their SDK or one they could license easily.

That's probably not going to happen, not w/o a big price increase anyway.

[Fuzzy]

Sage's source filters already seamlessly transition between files, for instance, when a recording is broken between two files.

[babgvant]

Originally Posted by stanger89

Standalone for discs and HD200 for rips, it's an awesome combo. And the quality is better to boot.

Are you saying that the HD200 has better PQ/AQ than a PC? If so, I think there was probably something wrong with your PC.

[babgvant]

Originally Posted by stanger89

It's not the same though, not by a long shot I don't think. Using standard source filters would result in pauses whenever you have to switch m2ts files. And standard source filters don't know about chapters.

Even if it was just chapters, AFAIK right now they just send chapter change commands to the Dshow nav filter, they'd have to bolt additional logic around the dshow playback to intercept the chapter change command and convert them to seek commands.

IAMExtendedSeeking.

If Sage used it, we could all have full chapter support for MKV.

While I'm at it: IAMStreamSelect support would net audio track selection. (My subtitle filter looks for this interface on the source/splitter to "forward" CC1/CC2 changes)

I don't know how Sage implements its playlist support, but there are ways to not have the pause.

[stanger89]

Originally Posted by babgvant

Hard to speculate on how hard it is to work w/ the HD200, but I don't think it would be harder to do w/ DS.

In total, I agree. As far as Sage's development effort, I'm betting Sage would have had to do more work to get it working in Dshow, I believe their DVD nav is in-house developed on the extenders, and thus probably only slightly tweaked for BD rips.

In contrast they use (AFAIK) off the shelf DVD Nav Dshow filters for DVD on the PC, so they wouldn't be able to leverage any of their extender work, BD plst support on the PC would basically be all new development.

The easiest thing would be to deal with the plst file outside of DirectShow and treat the file as a M2TS file (that already works) for playback.

All new development though, and would not fall in well with how Sage is architected right now I don't think.

Unless you're talking just start the m2ts that's associated with the longest plst file. Yeah, that would be trivial, but that wouldn't match what the HD extenders can do (chapters and seamless branching).

For the few discs that have more than one m2ts, use the existing playlist functionality (a tv show can span multiple files).

That's yet more development, and the branching wouldn't be seamless.

Personally, I'd be surprised if the source filter part is the sticking point. Sage doesn't ship with a M2TS splitter, so until their demuxer does it there's not much point in taking the [probably small] amount of time necessary to initiate playback from the bdmv.

I mean source/nav filter. I'm not aware of a Dshow source/nav filter that understands BDMV structures. Unless MPC made one, I think Sage would have to come up with one on their own.

There may be legal reasons why they don't include more OSS filters in the base install (although since AC3Filter is, maybe not), but it would provide a better OOTB experience if they did ship with a core set of OSS splitter/decoders. We'd all see a lot fewer "how come my mkv doesn't play?" threads...

They do ship with decoders, and they use their own demux for recordings, but for library files they use whatever Dshow has AFAIK.

That's probably not going to happen, not w/o a big price increase anyway.

Agreed.

Originally Posted by Fuzzy

Sage's source filters already seamlessly transition between files, for instance, when a recording is broken between two files.

But they aren't used for library files. And don't understand plst files.

Originally Posted by babgvant

Are you saying that the HD200 has better PQ/AQ than a PC? If so, I think there was probably something wrong with your PC.

Could be. All I know is when I replaced my HTPC with my 51FD I had comments form people who normally don't notice anything that the quality was better (picture at least). The HD200 is essentially identical to the 51FD for BD playback.

And with native output switching I get to leverage my projector's Gennum scaler vs the PCs which is way better at deinterlacing than my Blu-ray "upgraded" HTPC. And my dish recording (which were flagged weird) played smoother on the extender than the HTPC.

I dumped my HTPC for a reason and have had absolutely no regrets, and no desire to bring a PC back as a front end.

[stanger89]

Originally Posted by babgvant

IAMExtendedSeeking.

If Sage used it, we could all have full chapter support for MKV.

Again, never said it was impossible.

While I'm at it: IAMStreamSelect support would net audio track selection. (My subtitle filter looks for this interface on the source/splitter to "forward" CC1/CC2 changes)

They already support audio selection in m2ts AFAIK.

I don't know how Sage implements its playlist support, but there are ways to not have the pause.

But the way they do it today has pauses (which I've seen when I do a playlist of trailers before the main movie).

Which brings me all the way back to my original, main, and only point:

I don't think it's a case of Sage just "not caring" to impolement BDMV on the PC because they're devoting all their resources to the extenders. My estimation/theory is that through their (near as I can tell) in-house written DVD support, and in general (near as I can tell) largely in-house coded extender playback logic, it was very easy to add BDMV support to the extender. Where as it would be much more work for them to build the same sort of logic on the PC side.

And FWIW, there are some great things about Dshow. It's ability to plug and play filters from different developers gave us the broad array of DVD and media player solutions we've come to enjoy on the PC. It allows smaller houses like SageTV to leverage the work of others for media playback and focus on the user interface and other issues.

But being able to, and relying on 3rd party Dshow filters has it's pitfalls when you want to add functionality. If the filters you're using aren't yours, and you don't have the source for them, it ends up being harder to add functionality than if you'd had to bite the bullet and write the code you're using in the first place.

That is what I meant when I said it's harder on the PC because Sage uses Dshow. It's harder for Sage to add, because they don't have existing code/functionalty of their own they can leverage/modify/enhance. They need to start from scratch or wait for someone else to develop it.

[babgvant]

Originally Posted by stanger89

In contrast they use (AFAIK) off the shelf DVD Nav Dshow filters for DVD on the PC, so they wouldn't be able to leverage any of their extender work, BD plst support on the PC would basically be all new development.

They use the OOTB dvd nav filter, but they don't need to use a nav filter for bdmv since it's essentially just m2ts playback.

The hardest part is figuring out how to figure out which m2ts to play and how to apply chapters too it (probably the same thing). Since there are OSS project out there that already do this, adding the necessary layers to make it work wouldn't be that significant.

Originally Posted by stanger89

All new development though, and would not fall in well with how Sage is architected right now I don't think.

Unless you're talking just start the m2ts that's associated with the longest plst file. Yeah, that would be trivial, but that wouldn't match what the HD extenders can do (chapters and seamless branching).

pretty much. chapters wouldn't be hard to add if the engine supported the interfaces for doing it (which they don't but wouldn't be hard to add).

Originally Posted by stanger89

That's yet more development, and the branching wouldn't be seamless.

Why? If the framework is designed properly it shouldn't care about the inputs.

Originally Posted by stanger89

I mean source/nav filter. I'm not aware of a Dshow source/nav filter that understands BDMV structures. Unless MPC made one, I think Sage would have to come up with one on their own.

a bdmv nav is one way to solve it, but it's unnecessary. there's no reason they couldn't leverage existing bdmv parsing components outside of the actual playback to generate all the necessary bits to extend existing m2ts playback.

Originally Posted by stanger89

They do ship with decoders, and they use their own demux for recordings, but for library files they use whatever Dshow has AFAIK.

Yes, but they only support mpeg-ps, mpeg-ts, mpeg2, ac3, dts, mpa OOTB. How many years ago was that good enough to play everything in your library?

Figuring out source/splitter/decode filters is hard, they could make it easy.

Originally Posted by stanger89

Could be. All I know is when I replaced my HTPC with my 51FD I had comments form people who normally don't notice anything that the quality was better (picture at least). The HD200 is essentially identical to the 51FD for BD playback.

PQ is slightly different b/w the PC and HD200, but hard to say "better" either way. I can certainly do more with the PC (browsing menus, etc) during playback (not that "doing more" should be a test case ).

AQ is better w/ PC; full lossless audio support (including FLAC support for the content freed from plastic)

Originally Posted by stanger89

And with native output switching I get to leverage my projector's Gennum scaler vs the PCs which is way better at deinterlacing than my Blu-ray "upgraded" HTPC. And my dish recording (which were flagged weird) played smoother on the extender than the HTPC.

If memory serves (please correct me if wrong) you had a 780G with an AM2 proc; not having the required memory bandwidth for proper HD DI is a known issue with that combo.

[babgvant]

Originally Posted by stanger89

They already support audio selection in m2ts AFAIK.

I don't think it's supported on the PC using the directshow player.

Originally Posted by stanger89

Which brings me all the way back to my original, main, and only point:

I don't think it's a case of Sage just "not caring" to impolement BDMV on the PC because they're devoting all their resources to the extenders. My estimation/theory is that through their (near as I can tell) in-house written DVD support, and in general (near as I can tell) largely in-house coded extender playback logic, it was very easy to add BDMV support to the extender. Where as it would be much more work for them to build the same sort of logic on the PC side.

I would agree that its not an issue of desire but of effort and resources.

But I don't think that starting at the same point adding BDMV playback to the HD200 is easier than DirectShow (assuming the same target of course).

We have other options on the PC that aren't present on the HD200, for me those other options are good enough that I think adding BDMV support to the HD200 was a better choice vs doing the same on the PC.

Even if the Sage client "supported" BDMV I'd probably still use PDVD because it does have support for menus etc. Personally, I'd rather have a better MKV/M2TS experience (chapters, stream selection, subtitles) than BDMV "support" on the PC.

[stanger89]

Originally Posted by babgvant

They use the OOTB dvd nav filter, but they don't need to use a nav filter for bdmv since it's essentially just m2ts playback.

The hardest part is figuring out how to figure out which m2ts to play and how to apply chapters too it (probably the same thing). Since there are OSS project out there that already do this, adding the necessary layers to make it work wouldn't be that significant.

I was just playing with MPC's "support". It doesn't appear to look at the playlist file at all file at all, it just looks for the longest M2TS file and plays it, or maybe the first "big" one, I can't tell exactly which. It appears there's some threshold that it uses to determine which M2TS files in a BDMV structure are worth playing. Chapter skip skips to the next "worth" M2TS file, not the chapter in the playlist.

For example I just threw Hancock in my BD drive and pointed MPC at it. It says the movie is 5:50 long, which is about the length of the first segment. At the end of the segment it stopped, displayed the MPC splash screen, and then opened the next m2ts.

-edit - OK I'm even more confused by what it's doing, it looks like it plays Hancock, the long version, in the right order, picking the right m2ts files but it's definitely not seamless and no chapters.

pretty much. chapters wouldn't be hard to add if the engine supported the interfaces for doing it (which they don't but wouldn't be hard to add).

If memory serves (please correct me if wrong) you had a 780G with an AM2 proc; not having the required memory bandwidth for proper HD DI is a known issue with that combo.

That's right, but SD deinterlacing was crap too. That was the real problem.

Originally Posted by babgvant

I would agree that its not an issue of desire but of effort and resources.

But I don't think that starting at the same point adding BDMV playback to the HD200 is easier than DirectShow (assuming the same target of course).

That's my point, I really doubt there were starting from the same point.