Guides to playing Blu ray in SageTV

[Serra]

Originally Posted by Fuzzy

Sage doesn't have much to go on, so the only thing it can do is go by playlist length. It will pick the longest one. It appears that all 3 toy story BD's pick the french playlist as the longest (most likely something in the credits edges them a hair longer than english or spanish playlists). PowerDVD and TMT3 don't just 'pick' the right one, they pick the one the BD-J menu system no the disc navigate to.

This is the main problem I'm having with BDs. Several disks I've tried have had issues. Inception the main movie is smaller than the 'extended' version. Also the main movie is cut into a bunch of smaller pieces which makes playback impossible (unless the user wants to spend an hour finding the pieces.)

The Expendables also has this issue. The main movie picked by Sage is in French, and only a partial movie. I actually spent 30 minutes looking and never did find the English version.

In both of these cases, the only real option was to use DVDFab to extract the 'main movie' and go from there.

DVDFab works great a picking the main movie, so that is what I'm doing now for BD movies.

Another issue is series, I have Dexter S4 on BD. There is NO WAY to play this show from the menu. If you ask Sage to play it, you usually get only the first episode of 3 or 4 episodes per disk. DVDFab is no help with this issue, as far as I can tell. (it might be possible to use main movie and manually pick the episode files, haven't tried that) The only way to handle this is to search the file structure for the various episodes in Sage. This is not impossible, but much frowning from the wife when I explained this to her as the server has about 9 drives which are unlabeled in Sage, except for letters... She was able to navigate to watch Lost's final season, but I suspect that will be her last BD show. This also suffered from having an Audio format that her system didn't support as default. She had to reset the audio each episode. This is at the far edge of her willingness to cooperate.

So, BDs continue to be a major pain and working with them is problematic. However, since the people that make BDs seem intent on not doing nice things like letting me skip the previews, I think Sage is the answer to many issues, even if it does make more issues itself.

[Flips]

Originally Posted by Serra

This is the main problem I'm having with BDs. Several disks I've tried have had issues. Inception the main movie is smaller than the 'extended' version. Also the main movie is cut into a bunch of smaller pieces which makes playback impossible (unless the user wants to spend an hour finding the pieces.)

I watched inception this weekend and at first Sage picked the longest track (over 3 hours) which was the movie with interviews and behind the scenes in it. Looking at the list of titles I saw that title had an asterisk (*) next to it. There was another one wthout an * that was more like 2+ hours I picked that version and then it played fine.

I assume that the * denotes that it is a playlist of multiple titles. I saw this same behavior on planet earth where there was one title that plays all 3 episodes on the disc.

Maybe the disc I was playing didn't have the extended version on it, but I thought it did. Is this what your structure looks like?

flips

[mkstretch]

Originally Posted by Fuzzy

How is your audio setup? Are you using an external receiver? HD200 or 300? The HD200 cannot decode DTS, just bitstream it via SPDIF or HDMI, so you'll have to have something to decode the DTS.

I just got a Pioneer receiver, now to get it to play the HD audio I just plug the HD200 into the pioneer receiver?

[Fuzzy]

Originally Posted by mkstretch

I just got a Pioneer receiver, now to get it to play the HD audio I just plug the HD200 into the pioneer receiver?

I don't do extenders... not sure, but I think the HD300 is required for HDAudio... but I've certainly been wrong before... You will at least be able to stream the DTS or DD core streams to the receiver.

[Slipshod]

If you haven't check out MakeMKV yet, you should. It's really easy to use and lets you easily rip multiple episode BluRays into seperate MKV files, and filter out which audio tracks are kept for each title. It's made BD much more manageable for me in SageTV.