hello. This is a flat out usage question.

Sorry - I hope this makes sense.. im not a linux person so i struggle with the correct wording.


say for example, my flatmate brings home a dvd-r with 5 movies within subdirectories. so the disk file structure is
\cdrom\various directories(plural)\movie.avi

I wasnt able to work out how to get xine or the internal player to play these directly from the optical disk using the mythtv frontend menu. The only way i could work out how to do it was to open a terminal window and copy them from the optical disk into the directory used to store my videos. Then play them through the videos menu.

Can i play these movies directly from the DVD? When i stick the disk into the dvd drive, mythtv opens up the image gallery menu(? actually it's not exactly the same - but i can't find the menu page that it brings up by looking through the frontend menu) - as i presume it would if i stuck a cd full of photos in the drive. From this menu I was able to see the file structure on the disk, but i wasnt able to play any of the files using xine.

My thoughts were that I would stick such a disk into the drive, mythtv would open up a menu, which i would able to search through using the remote control. I could select the video files, be they xvid, avi or whatever, and then mythtv would launch (say) xine, and play the video directly from the dvd.

Also - Is there a menu option to import such files, rather than copying them through the terminal.

If it is relevant, im using project Graham theme. Which is excellent btw.

maybe i can add the optical drive as a directory to the mythvideo setup?

If you have media monitoring enable when you insert a CD or DVD in the drive, MythGallery should start. Using MythGallery, you can browse the media and it will launch Mplayer and play the video.

Thanks Cecil. I couldnt get that to work on the afore mentioned disk so i tried a different one containing a bunch of old american dad clips. most of which worked played fine through mplayer but some of which didnt. For the files that played, mythgallery gave me a nice screen shot as the folder .. for the files that wouldnt play, mythgallery only gave me a yellow folder to look at.

strangely, it seems to work perfectly for some files, but not others. I had thought it was a codec problem, but all the files are .avi, the video codec is xvid. the audio codec is the same for all the movies.

all the files work through the VLC player on my windows box.

I need someone to help me look for the problem - ie why some video files play from disk using mplayer but others do not - despite them having (i believe) the same codecs - at least they all use xvid. All the movies play fine on my windows laptop using VLC .. but I'm not sure if that means anything.

thanks guys

There is a problem with some files. I'm pretty sure that if there is a space in the file name myth has a problem playing the file (script probably doesn't escape the spaces). I'll have a look at this, as it's annoying. It will work if you import the files, so consider this a workaround.

in an xterm, you can do this easily, although there may be a gui way.

Ask if you need more help.

Mike

P.S. Are there spaces in the files that won't play?

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LinHES 7.4
Australian Dragon
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thanks for reply mike. no actually some of the avi files that play have spaces, and some of the ones that dont have none.

Can you give me some tips to diagnose?

what ill do is import the files via xterm and change the names to have no spaces.. this will tell me if its something about the files. in which case ill assume a codec problem.

is there a way i can find out exactly which codec was used? my crap way was to look at the file properties in VLC .. but this doesnt give me codec version numbers or whatever. Though the family guy clips at least are quite old so im not convinced that is the problem.

There may be some other reason than just spaces, but if you can play them after importing, it's not a codec problem.

The obvious way that comes to mind to determine what codec's being used would be to use lsof. Run ps -ef|grep mplayer when a file's being played to find the pid of the mplayer process. Next, lsof -p <pid> will tell you every resource associated with the master process (being mplayer playing the file). lsof tells you everything being used, including libs, so this should tell you what you need to know.

Regards

Mike

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LinHES 7.4
Australian Dragon
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Hi,

I would suspect that your windows box is physically different machine (not dual boot). It may be something as simple as the drive has trouble trying to read the optical media. I would try to copy all the files into the /myth/video and then play them from there. If they can be copied, they should play as you mentioned they were all avi files.

Mike