WD TV starts playing bluray ISO partway through the film

WD Legacy Products WD TV Live & Live Plus
1

I’m using DVDFab bluray copy to copy my bluray movies to an ISO … my WD TV player plays most of them no problem but on some films (Inception, Iron Man 2, Green Lantern) even though it looks like DVDFab has worked properly (ie playback via dvdfab preview on the file starts ok), when I play the film on the media player, it seems to start playback partway through the film, roughly about 30mins from the beginning.

I’ve also seem one instance of the player suddenly going into fast forward.

I’ve tried re-copying the films and have installed the latest firmware (that resolved another problem with it seeing >2TB drives).

Hope someone can help solve this problem.  Thanks.

2

It’s because the studio authored the BD using non-contiguous M2TS “Segments.”

The WD has no idea how to play these types of Blurays because the WD’s cannot interpet the “Playlists.”

You can use TSMuxerGUI (which DOES understand playlists) to rip out the Movie and convert it to the proper sequence.

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Thanks.  Will give that a go.

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Right, it “was an accident” that WDTV kind of played an ISO.  Most don’t play at all.

Another good program for converting blu-ray ISOs is Bytecopy to convert the ISO to MKV which WDTV can play.

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The LIVE usually plays the largest m2ts file it can find (in the ISO) which isn’t necessarily the beginning of the movie. I have no idea why some discs are authored like this while others have one m2ts for the entire movie.

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The reason things are scattered into multiple M2TS files is because some BD movies make extensive use of seamless branching features.

“Up!” is a good example of this.

If the viewer sets a different “Language” during setup, then entire scenes of the movie are replaced on-the-fly.

There’s several scenes of old news-reel footage that show pictures of newspaper headlines, and “Captions.”  (Not PGS subtitles in the normal sense, but actual images in the video stream.)

If the user is watching the video in “French,” instead of English, then a half dozen or more scenes are replaced with french newspapers instead of the “New York Times,” or whatever.

It’s amazing how complex BD’s can be.

One can use BDInfo to see how the different streams are branched together.

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TonyPh12345 wrote:

The reason things are scattered into multiple M2TS files is because some BD movies make extensive use of seamless branching features.

 

“Up!” is a good example of this.

 

If the viewer sets a different “Language” during setup, then entire scenes of the movie are replaced on-the-fly.

 

DVDs have done that too, through the use of “Angles”, and the WDTVs also don’t handle them properly.

Things like “Star Wars” have the opening crawl once in English, once in French, and once in Spanish, or several Disney movies have on-screen English and on-screen French (such as boxes/crates, newspapers (as Tony pointed out in “Up”), etc…), or some Disney discs have “pencil test” extras as a second “angle”.

When you play it on a stand-alone DVD player, it plays fine… just plays the selected angle and ignores the others.

But, when you try it on the WD devices, it plays each angle in succession… you get the Star Wars crawl in English, then again in French, then again in Spanish, or you get the Disney scene with the props and set dressing in English, then again in French, or you watch the theatrical scene, and then watch it repeated as a pencil test.

Any DVD authored with angles, unless you want the frustration of repeated bits, must have the angle you want ripped out, and then that file viewed, for the movie to play properly.

The BluRay discs are just doing the same thing under a different name.  Instead of different “angles” to the stream, there are different “playlists”.  Either way, as Tony says, if you have one like that, you need to “fix” it yourself when you rip it.

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Interesting info guys regarding how the DVDs and blu-rays are put together in various “segments”.  When I burned my blu-ray Toy Story 3 to ISO, the Live skipped the first scene and then began playing.  No problem, it came with a DVD, too, and that’s what’s on the WDTV hard drive; 8 GB instead of around 40GB for MKV.  If I want to see the blu-ray again, I’ll just slip in the bku-ray disc, but for showing to grandkids again from the Live, DVD will do!

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I live in Australia; I can relate to all the experiences posted above. Countries also have varying censorship regulations. I have seen different scenes in the same movie once a DVD is ripped and re-authored.

I purchased a HP N36L Server and turned it into a HTPC. I watch bluray through the HP N36L and use the WDTV Live only for watching DVD’s.

The WDTV Live and HP N36L Server also make good video companions. HP occasionally clears the HP N36L at below NAS prices and there is a dedicated HP N36L hacking forum.

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Thanks for the info guys, it’s only affected 3 blurays so far - I’ll either convert to mkv or follow the other idea of ripping the dvd versions to the wd tv and keep the bluray disks nearby if I want to view them directly.

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Thanks, I know seamless branching from DVDs and assumed something similar was used on BDs. However, there are some BDs that don’t need/use it that still have the main movie split into several m2ts. The next time I come across these, I’ll post about it.