In about two years I have seen change the world of digital entertainment, thanks to WD.
The first release of firmware of my WD TV was a DOS version in comparison to the current WD TV Live one!
But I believe that the timing of the wonders is died. The new firmware still filing bugs, but the innovations are lacking.
Just read the blog to see how people always ask for the ability to play Blu-ray menus, but for WD this idea is “Unplanned”. So it would seem for the WD TV Live Hub too. We know that is not a hardware problem, and then what?
Netgear NeoTV NTV550 can play BluRay menu using similar hardware. BD 2.0 Profiles supported attacking an external drive. So where’s the matter for WD?
We will never see a new innovative firmware again?
Do not misunderstand: the WD TV is a great product, but I think there is some absurdity on firmware.
The media player can play a m2ts file, taken from an ISO image, without any problems. The question is: how it selects the m2ts file?
I could see that the selection is made according to the size of the file: it plays thr greatest. In some cases the WD TV Live plays the extras, instead of the film. In other cases playback starts not from the beginning of the film (the first m2ts file was smaller than senconds).
Is it really impossible to read the table of contents of the iso image (as IFO files for DVD) extracting the correct file and maybe even read the chapters in order to be able to advance without having to use it as a VHS?
If this option is already implemented and I do not know it, please considered this post trash. Otherwise I think the lack is really shameful.
Well, it’s POSSIBLE, but that’s not likely to happen any time soon, if at all.
There isn’t really a “Table of Contents” so to speak on a BD. There’s a list of PLAYLIST files. And there can be hundreds of them. The WD would have to load every playlist and determine from the aggregate lengths of the referred TS files to determine which file is the one to play. But even that isn’t foolproof. Fake Playlists are a common tactic in BD copy protection.
BDs actually have JAVA applications on them that control the menu structure and to determine which playlist does what.
So there’s a few things you can do to make it work perfectly:
1> Use BDINFO program to see which PLAYLIST is the one that contains the main feature.
2> Use TSMuxerGUI to open that PLAYLIST file, and re-mux the main feature into a single M2TS file.
All of that takes about 15 minutes (depending on the size of the movie, and the speed of your computer / storage.
I’ve ripped only about a dozen BD’s and haven’t seen that yet. Been lucky, I guess! Good info.
Probably none by Disney / Pixar then. :) I think EVERY one of them I’ve ripped is all squirelly.
But in some cases, it makes perfect sense why they do it.
In UP! for example, the movie is “branched” in quite a few locations to account for foreign languages. If you’ve seen that movie, you may recall a couple of locations where they show “Newsreel” footage, or show a newspaper, or something like that. All of those scenes have foreign-language (or more accurately, foreign TEXT) on screen, so they branch to different M2TS files that have those other languages rendered.
So ripping that one is particularly challenging because you have to know which movie (and there’s quite a few) represents not only the main movie, but the main movie in YOUR LANGUAGE. :)
