MPC HC & Blu ray

[lol_123]

Does MPC HC support to playback blu ray?
It seems that the latest release version 20081128 can not
play with blu ray disc.

[tetsuo55]

Yes, but the disk has to be decrypted with a tool like anydvd first.

[rack04]

Also note that MPC-HC doesn't support seemless branching. It will play the largest m2ts file.

[mark0077]

yep, that caught me out recently, had a terrible time playing a few blu-rays that had a whole load of m2ts files instead of one large one. Any work being done on stuff like this? Might be small things like this that will make people use PowerDVD instead of mpc-hc for blu-ray for example.

[Matching_Mole]

I completely agree with mark0077.

MPC-HC has made incredible progress and this is the last thing which are really annoying with it to play blu-ray.

[tetsuo55]

Patches are welcome.....

(most people aren't too exited about working on playlists)

[lol_123]

what makes it so difficult to support blu-ray

[tetsuo55]

what makes it so difficult to support blu-ray

JAVA makes it difficult.

But this playlist thing is purely caused by no-one caring enough to look at the boring code.

[clsid]

what makes it so difficult to support blu-ray
It takes a few thousand man hours to implement full blu-ray support. Not something one does for fun in their spare time.

[Rectal Prolapse]

In theory it should be possible to present the user with a list of all the playlists, along with their times, track info, etc. Then the user can select one for playback. Very simple, no Java involved, but does involve guesswork on the part of the user!

The hard part is the seamless branching stuff - audio can overlap, and the decoders/splitters would need to be changed to handle this without audio dropouts/repeats.

I would guess the latter would be very difficult to implement.

[Blight]

What is actually needed is a DirectShow M2TS source filter that can take a list of M2TS file names and start-stop point for each file and transparently mesh them into a single video presented to the video decoding filter.

Reading the Blu-Ray playlists is not overly complex, it's only the issue of getting the source filter adapted. I would be willing to donate to see such a filter coming into existence (with full docs of a COM interface for assigning the playlist data).

[setarip_old]

If your interest is in playing BluRay "movies-only" (No menu, etc.), simply use (presently freeware) "MakeMKV" (NO need for "AnyDVD"). With one-click it will remove copy protection, properly interpret the playlist and create already-joined proper titles from them, to make it simple to pick the main movie and convert it to a ready-to-play .MKV...

[allak]

As far as I understand it one would have to parse the playlist files (nnnnn.mpls) and use that informations to merge the content of the stream files (mmmmm.clpi + mmmmm.m2ts).

Is a technical spec for those formats available somewhere ? Most of the projects I have seen around seems to have reverse enginereed the format of those files (e.g. Madshi for his eac3to tool).

All I've found so far is a patent: http://www.freepatentsonline.com/EP1821310.html

[Blight]

allak:
There is a spec, and there are already tools parsing these formats (with source) such as BDInfo.

The M2TS format is simply MPEG2 Transport Stream, which there are parsers/decoders for. The problem is, the parsers don't give the option to merge multiple .M2TS files programmatically according to the start and end point which are listed in the playlist .mpls files.

[lol_123]

allak:
There is a spec, and there are already tools parsing these formats (with source) such as BDInfo.

The M2TS format is simply MPEG2 Transport Stream, which there are parsers/decoders for. The problem is, the parsers don't give the option to merge multiple .M2TS files programmatically according to the start and end point which are listed in the playlist .mpls files.

allak, where is the spec located at, i googled for few hours but got nothing in details about the formats.

[allak]

@lol_123: That is what I was asking for, I do not have the spec either !

@Blight: I am aware of BDInfo and about the general structure of the BDMV filesystem, but I was wondering if the official spec is available.

The best I have found so far is another European Patent, the EP1870895A1; this one seems to be pretty detailed, starting on page 28 it has plenty of tables with the format of the *mpls files.

[Rectal Prolapse]

You need to spend around $6000 USD to get the full Blu-ray spec. Sorry!

There are a couple of free (but not detailed) specs on the BDA website.