I've have seen that happen on a few movies. I think that mencoder is always playing track one, even though I am telling it to play the main title. The problem is that the main title isn't always track one. As soon as I have some free time I'm going to look into it.

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Asus Crosshair motherboard
Athlon X2 4600+
4GB OCZ SLI-Ready memory
MSI 8500GT
Western Digital Raptor for OS
Dual WD SATA 2 drives in RAID 0 for TV
2TB Raid5 external ESATA media storage
Dual Hauppauge PVR-1600 hybrid tuners
Origen X15e case

Would there be a way to prompt for which track or VOB you start with when you select to play the movie?

Sorry, but no. The hook I'm using does not allow interaction of any kind.

All I need to do is go through the list of titles on the disc and find the largest one. I can tell mencoder to play that one and that should fix almost all of these problems. I took a quick look and it is surprisingly non-trivial. But like I said, when time permits, I'll give it a shot.

PS there is a new version of the transcoder out, 2.2. There were several issues in the .reg file that I hadn't noticed that are now fixed. I've also expanded the readme file to include more detailed installation instructions and  fixes for some common problems. If you've already got it working there is no need to download this since the code has not changed.

---

Asus Crosshair motherboard
Athlon X2 4600+
4GB OCZ SLI-Ready memory
MSI 8500GT
Western Digital Raptor for OS
Dual WD SATA 2 drives in RAID 0 for TV
2TB Raid5 external ESATA media storage
Dual Hauppauge PVR-1600 hybrid tuners
Origen X15e case

I've investigated a few of these problem titles, and most have trailers or FBI warnings or elaborate animated openings and then the movie is in VTS_02_xx.vob.

As a work around I took a couple of titles and ran them thru DVD Fab and did main movie only and those (testing now) will play.

I have a couple of titles that just refuse to play at all on the extender although they'll play off the NAS in VMC. I'll try the workaround with those as well.

I hope Vader comes up with a better solution since recoding takes both time and space.

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XPS420: Quad, 3 Gig, 650/1T internal, 1T eSata
Dual ATI Cable Cards (SA-800 M)
T-W W Valley (LA)
ATI Radeon HD3650 (DVI/HDMI)
2 Maxtor NAS (320/500)
3 Ximeta NDAS (each 500)
2 XP, 1 Macintosh X (10.4.11), HP 280N extender, Linksys DMA2100

I am extremely new to Media Center (about 3 days) and I got a media center extender last night.  I stumbled across this thread today and used vader's hack to get things going on my 2100.  It seems to work pretty well so far.  I changed my cache to delay a little more and allow for more movie to be cached in case we need to skip ahead right away.  I also changed the temp path to a different location where I have more room so I can keep 10 movies cached.  So far so good.  It would have been nice if they just put this functionality in it to begin with.  I'll let you know if I run into any issues.  Thanks Vader.

vader504:

Sorry, but no. The hook I'm using does not allow interaction of any kind.

 

No worries, no harm in asking :-)

I wanted to thank you for efforts so far though, it's a brilliant solution to a ridiculous problem that Microsoft created.

 

 

Thanks! I was hoping to have some time to work on the main track issue this weekend but now it looks like I may be evacuating for hurricane Gustav. This time around I think I'll move my PC all the way to the top of the house before I leave. Katrina got my last system, and  a lot of my dvds. They are not as waterproof as they look.

---

Asus Crosshair motherboard
Athlon X2 4600+
4GB OCZ SLI-Ready memory
MSI 8500GT
Western Digital Raptor for OS
Dual WD SATA 2 drives in RAID 0 for TV
2TB Raid5 external ESATA media storage
Dual Hauppauge PVR-1600 hybrid tuners
Origen X15e case

vader504:

With my transcoder dll, you can select the audio track by changing "-alang en" to "-alang fr" in the arguments section of the transcoder control panel.

I was thinking about adding a pulldown in the control panel to make this easier.  Would anyone be interested in that?

please do so !

I'm trying to play my dvd's with audio track DUTCH. So I have changed "-alang en" to "-alang du" but no success...still english

Am i doing something wrong? I also tried "-alang du, en"...first dutch, then english (when dutch not available).

I have a large number of dvd's in dutch and english. I prefer english, but for kids it's better in dutch...

Also having problems rewinding and forwarding movies. Sometimes does not work...tells me the movie is only 30 seconds long

What you did should have worked. I added the -alang en  because some of my discs defaulted to French and it fixed the problem.

Are you sure that du is the correct code? Some of the documentation says its a two letter code, some three. Two seems to work for english.

Perhaps you could try to play the disc in Mplayer and see if you can get it to play the Dutch audio track.

---

Asus Crosshair motherboard
Athlon X2 4600+
4GB OCZ SLI-Ready memory
MSI 8500GT
Western Digital Raptor for OS
Dual WD SATA 2 drives in RAID 0 for TV
2TB Raid5 external ESATA media storage
Dual Hauppauge PVR-1600 hybrid tuners
Origen X15e case

I'm trying to play my dvd's with audio track DUTCH. So I have changed "-alang en" to "-alang du" but no success...still english

Am i doing something wrong? I also tried "-alang du, en"...first dutch, then english (when dutch not available).

You have to use NL (for Neterlands) not DU.

Here is a link to see all the codes : http://www.dvd-replica.com/DVD/vtslanguage.php

 

Anyone else see this?

A some point an extender (either Linksys 2100 or HP x280N) won't play a dvd from the dvd library with an error message "error playing dvd".

Restarting the extenders did nothing and there were some dvds that would play (I've been experimenting with ripping with main movie only in DVD Fab and also using Nero Recode "merge" to pull movies) and other would not.

I found that if I started the Control Panel ap for Vader's .dll and just made a change (up number of saved files or increase time wait one up) that suddenly everything would work again.

I don't now where to "install" the control panel, right now it just is in the folder that I unzipped from the download.

Could it be that this needs a periodic reset? I leave the VMC on all the time and I've been leaving the extenders on.

Edit: I think I just had the number of files to store set too low. I just ran into the problem again, went to the VMC machine, opened control panel for transcode.dll and increased the number of files and then the dvd played. Have been having strange things happen with the HP x280N however. It logged off by it self in the middle of a show. It's restarted itself in the middle of a show usually around 9:10 to 9:30 pm. Waiting to hear from HP on this.

John

---

XPS420: Quad, 3 Gig, 650/1T internal, 1T eSata
Dual ATI Cable Cards (SA-800 M)
T-W W Valley (LA)
ATI Radeon HD3650 (DVI/HDMI)
2 Maxtor NAS (320/500)
3 Ximeta NDAS (each 500)
2 XP, 1 Macintosh X (10.4.11), HP 280N extender, Linksys DMA2100

vader504:

The only other significant change (which I think I put in 1.9), was adding a setting to limit the number of items in the cache. I got tired of cleaning it out manually.,

Hi Vader, I hope Gustav didn't do too much damage...

I want to let you know that I think I found a problem with version 2.0 which delete automatically the mpg files in the tanscoder cache directory.

Here is the situation: I have 2 x DMA2200 and I leave them on all the time like everybody I suppose. If with one extender I look at a movie, the mpg file generated by the transcoder in the cache can't be deleted by the other extender and it gives an error. I looked in the trancoderlog.txt file and the error was that it tried to erase the mpg file (in use by the other extender) but was not able. I powered of the other extender and it solved the problem.

I guess each extender should have it's own cache or maybe you should try to erase the next mpg file to keep it under the maximum selected.

But anyway your piece of code is doing a great job. I hope the guys at OML will integrate your work in their architecture. Thanks again.

No Gustav damage, but also no power. Luckily I have a portable generator that can be hooked to the house and a lot of fuel.

Thanks for pointing out that bug. I definitely need to handle exceptions better in the cleanup code. It's not a huge problem, because the cleanup code tries to delete all the files except the youngest 'n' every time it runs, so if it misses a file on one cleanup it should get it on the next. But you're right, there could be more than 'n' in the cache until that happens.

I'll post a fix in a few days when I have steady power. Things are a little unstable around here at the moment.

---

Asus Crosshair motherboard
Athlon X2 4600+
4GB OCZ SLI-Ready memory
MSI 8500GT
Western Digital Raptor for OS
Dual WD SATA 2 drives in RAID 0 for TV
2TB Raid5 external ESATA media storage
Dual Hauppauge PVR-1600 hybrid tuners
Origen X15e case

I just uploaded a new version of my transcoder dll. The new version does a much better job identifying the correct title to play. I've also fixed a bug in the cache cleanup code. It should do a better job limiting the files to the number you specify.

 

---

Asus Crosshair motherboard
Athlon X2 4600+
4GB OCZ SLI-Ready memory
MSI 8500GT
Western Digital Raptor for OS
Dual WD SATA 2 drives in RAID 0 for TV
2TB Raid5 external ESATA media storage
Dual Hauppauge PVR-1600 hybrid tuners
Origen X15e case

Thanks, installed and got it finally working on vista x64 !

Now I'm trying to get subtitles, anyone? I tried "-slang du" and "-slang nl"

both not working. anyone tried it before?

 

Thank you!