When I was about to watch a DVD-movie with the old 1.02.21 firmware I could just press “play” and … watch the movie!
Now I’ve upgraded to the new 1.04.10 firmware which includes DVD-menus just to have me confronted with a truckload of advertisement and unskippable copyright-hints before the actual movie starts.
I really appreciated the fact, that WD-TV does not annoy me with that junk all the time like a DVD-player does.
except you have to replace “pirate” with 1.02.21 firmware and “paying customer” with 1.04.10 firmware.
So I really would appreciate it if WD adds an option to the next firmware-release which allows the user to disable the DVD-menu and play the actual movie at once, just like it worked with 1.02.21!
It’s a hard call as to if you are condoning piracy, but I’ll give you the benefit of the doubt. Whatever you see is a result of how you ripped your DVD, not what the WDTV does. If you don’t want all the PUOPS, disable them when you rip, or just rip the main title only. Or, just use the PREVIEW mode of the WDTV and skip right into the movie, just like the older software did.
TonyPh12345 wrote:
It’s a hard call as to if you are condoning piracy, but I’ll give you the benefit of the doubt. Whatever you see is a result of how you ripped your DVD, not what the WDTV does. If you don’t want all the PUOPS, disable them when you rip, or just rip the main title only. Or, just use the PREVIEW mode of the WDTV and skip right into the movie, just like the older software did.
I agree. You can always rip just the main movie and the audio tracks & subtitles.
If Western Digital thinks the DVD-playback function is condoning piracy why do they offer it at all? And if they don’t think so they should realize it’s especially the legit customer who simply pulls an ISO-Image of the disc with AnyDVD is the one who will get annoyed with trailers and ads. As the picture shows, so called “scene-releases” don’t contain any advertisement at all!
Also this is not about dvix-rips but about ISO-Images.
I didn’t say anything about WD condoning piracy. There are plenty of sources of legal DVDs that are freely copyable, but your graphic is ONLY relavent to copyrighted sources. And, you didn’t read any of the rest of the posts. No one mentioned DIVX; what I referred to is with DVD ISO Full backups.
TonyPh12345 wrote:
There are plenty of sources of legal DVDs that are freely copyable, but your graphic is ONLY relavent to copyrighted sources.
No, my graphic relies to legit DVDs ONLY which are packed with ads and copyright-hints you didn’t have to care about with good old firmware 1.02.21.
Since you don’t seem to catch the point, let’s get straight to it. You have two choices:
Re-rip your ISOs or DVDs into ISOs that have just the main movie, no extras. Most DVD rippers can do that.
Rollback to “good old firmware” 1.02.21
You need to understand that if you didn’t see the ads before, it wasn’t because WD wanted to do you a favor, but because it didn’t support the standard DVD structure, just the .VOB files. Furthermore, if you have a complaint, you should be directing it at the film companies that bloat the DVDs with all that ■■■■, not WD for playing DVDs the way they are supposed to be played.
You need to understand that if you didn’t see the ads before, it wasn’t because WD wanted to do you a favor, but because it didn’t support the standard DVD structure, just the .VOB files.
*> Yes I know it was only a good feature “on accident”. Therefore I asked them to make it a regular good feature by giving the users the choice to directly play the movie or not.
You really should just re-rip (or should have done so in the first place) your DVDs without all the undesired segments. I’m a novice and have found how easy it is to do with the freeware I found. I’ll never listen to or read captions in French or Spanish, so why waste the space on my hdd? I just get rid of it before I rip. Presto.
Funny how the menus let me access all what’s uninteresting and junk in some dvds but not the film (for iso images that didn’t use to work). Films that worked still do, only menus just make the process longer and more cumbersome to me. But maybe that’s just me.
Can’t really understand how all these people worried about how many clicks it takes them to access their media would want menus.
If it doesn’t become an option, I think I will indeed rollback to the latest firmware that played it the way I liked it. Plus along with menu support we lost the ability to zoom while playing iso image. What with both these drawbacks, I’d rather call it a downdate.
Yes one can re-rip everything from their existing isos, but that takes time for nothing, given the number of isos one may have (20+ for me).
The reason I like (and bought) the wdtvlive in the first place is that you precisely don’t have to do anything at all to your files to play them.
I don’t have a ps3, but it seems there are quite a lot of ps3 owners who bought an extra digital player (whether from WD or not) just so they can play their files without having to re-encode them. Yes the ps3 can play virtually anything, even your dvds if you take the time to rip them and encode them the right way, yes once you’ve done it once it’s easy, but some people just don’t want to do it, and I believe it’s a comfort such devices as ours should offer.
Funny how the menus let me access all what’s uninteresting and junk in some dvds but not the film (for iso images that didn’t use to work). Films that worked still do, only menus just make the process longer and more cumbersome to me. But maybe that’s just me.
Can’t really understand how all these people worried about how many clicks it takes them to access their media would want menus.
If it doesn’t become an option, I think I will indeed rollback to the latest firmware that played it the way I liked it. Plus along with menu support we lost the ability to zoom while playing iso image. What with both these drawbacks, I’d rather call it a downdate.
Yes one can re-rip everything from their existing isos, but that takes time for nothing, given the number of isos one may have (20+ for me).
The reason I like (and bought) the wdtvlive in the first place is that you precisely don’t have to do anything at all to your files to play them.
I don’t have a ps3, but it seems there are quite a lot of ps3 owners who bought an extra digital player (whether from WD or not) just so they can play their files without having to re-encode them. Yes the ps3 can play virtually anything, even your dvds if you take the time to rip them and encode them the right way, yes once you’ve done it once it’s easy, but some people just don’t want to do it, and I believe it’s a comfort such devices as ours should offer.
Well, it did so far.
You gave a +1 to Larry and then obviously never bothered to read the rest of the thread.
As has been said if you do not want the menu’s then go to the preview menu and enter the right hand box. You will then get the main film only with all the zooms etc. Sorted.
While I had not tested the thing it’s a little abrupt of you to assume that I hadn’t read anything at all. I had.
I should have mentioned that I’m no big fan of the preview mode.
Never really liked it, so it wasn’t an option for me to solve anything by admitting I should use something I don’t like.
But your pointing out I didn’t read these posts made me try it out if only to make a decent reply, and fair enough, it does make it faster to access the movie than by using menus. But it still takes too long a while to generate the preview, one of the reasons why I didn’t like the preview mode in the first place. [off topic] The other reasons is I don’t see the point, I either know my movies or know why I want to play one, I don’t need a preview ; plus I find navigating in thumbnails mode faster. [/off]
I admit I shouldn’t have brushed off that possibility this fast, my bad. I was wrong.
But I still consider the problem half-solved. Ok, a bit more than that given the zoom thing is ok. Thank you for this
But I can’t say I’m 100% happy with this though.
And about zooming, I still think it should be available if you’re playing your dvd through menus, which I might just want to do in some cases.
I thought you could just press the play button on the Video_ts folder to play just the movie
Whereas if you want the dvd menu, you go into the folder and press ok on the first vob
And just a side note. Throughout the beta firmware, the zoom option was never implemented for playing via the dvd menu so its not something that was “taken away”
There’s another consideration at play here: preview mode only plays the first title on a disc, which means that for some DVDs (notably those which are a compendium of episodes from a TV series, for example) you can only watch the first episode.
As others have stated, you likely need to re-rip the DVDs with software that will let you remove UOPs; once those are gone, you can usually avoid the ads and skip straight to the menu. The best (read: works most consistently) luck I’ve had in this regard is with DVDFab.
Also, one thing I would like to add regarding why people want to skip the UOPs: there are commercially-produced DVDs intended for home use that force you to sit through several minutes of advertising every time you pop them in. If memory serves, one of the worst offenders in this regard was the 1999 Region 1 release of ‘Animal House’ in full-frame: it was annoying enough to find out that I was being subjected to ads for coming releases the first time I watched it after purchasing it, but it just became increasingly more annoying as time wore on to be forcibly subjected to them as their relevancy declined. Yeah, people pirate movies, but not everyone who wants to skip the UOPs is a pirate.
I’m not sure HOW it’s SUPPOSED to work, but when I do a preview of a “TV Series” type disk, I get all episodes and they’re just stuck together.
So, like the X-Files has four episodes on each disk. When I start one up in NON-MENU mode, I get all four in a row, as if it were a 3-hour-long episode.
If never actually sat and WATCHED anything like that, but the timeline and everything appears to work as one would expect.
I think it will ulitmately play EVERYTHING that’s in the structure, including all the JUNK, and it’ll play it in Ascending TITLE ORDER.
More likely than not, all the previews and other junk are HIGH title numbers (like 20 or 30) and the main episodes are Titles 1,2,3,4.
So if I actually fast-forwarded to the end of Title 4, I’d probably see the menus and extra junk at the end.
I USED to do what you describe with DVD-Fab; just tell it to remove the “Annoying PGC’s,” I think is what DVDFab calls them, but it had an unusual side effect.
Usually I can hit MENU and jump straight to the Disk Home menu and skip anything else. But when I had that option enabled, if I hit MENU, The WD-Live would just bail out and go back to the WD Menu. That meant I had to start the movie and Fast-Forward through all the other junk until the menu arrived.
