I would like to get away from xp mediacenter completly and just go mythtv. The only thing that I havn't figured out from this great forum is how would I mount and play a dvd image from a server. Somebody made a plugin for mediacenter that allowed you to browse a menu that had cd covers and information about the movie and you could press play and it would mount the dvd iso using daemon tools and then you could watch is as a regular dvd. Thats what I would like to do with mythtv. I know you can mount an iso, in linux, so it probally wouldn't be that hard. Any ideas, or is this idea already in progress, and I just don't know the mythtv name for it?

I go to the DVD entry in the menu, select that, and then select the "play DVD" entry. I've got it configured so it runs xine under the covers rather than mplayer but properly set up either one should work. Other people like ogle for this. I never had any luck with mplayer and find xine works better because of it's menu support, but that topic has been discussed to death in another thread. It's easy to set up and well documented in the forums.

tjc I think you missed what he is wanting to do, and I don't think it exists, although I suppose it would be possible with more than a little bit of hacking. What he's wanting is to be able to go to the video portion or even create a new portion that works similar to video call it dvdjukebox, and it has the movie covers etc like the video section, but when you press play it mounts an iso image in loopback and then starts xine using that new mount and gives you full dvd menus and all.

It's an interesting Idea, but to my knowledge noone has done or even talked about anything like this.

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Xsecrets

In that case why not just rip it into the videos directory...

However, most of the players let you configure where to look for an MRL, so redirecting it to another (possibly remote) file system should be doable...

See, I want to have a backup dvd server just so when a dvd gets messed up, like scratched really bad or cracked, I can just burn another one. (I have small kids) And I just think its cool.

What is it you want exactly? First you start you want to be able to play a DVD that is in the drive of a Windows server. Then you state you'd just like to play video files on from a Windows server.
I don't think the first is possible w/ a convential mount. The second is possible. Search the forum as much has been discussed about mount share on a Windows system.

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cesman

When the source is open, the possibilities are endless!

well I think what you guys are missing is he doesn't want to play an .avi file or a .mpg file or a .vob file. He wants to have a .iso on a drive somewhere, and when he slects it he wants to mount the iso and play it as if it were a dvd in a drive, so he has all the menu's and everything. I would say it could be possible, but it would take quite a bit of work and one mean command line for the .iso extention in the video device section.

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Xsecrets

I like the idea too. I've done a little research and here are a couple of relevant messages:

http://gossamer-threads.com/lists/mythtv/users/73436

http://gossamer-threads.com/lists/mythtv/dev/85254

This is something I'd like to try. I'll get around to it after I get satisfactory quality from my HDTV playback.

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Uhm... You know, come to think of it, I may have actually done this, or something very much like it... I was trying to work out the details of creating ISO images to burn to optical disks and ended up testing them with xine on a loopback mount or something like that... The details are fuzzy... The browsing part is harder but not that much so... You could probably even pervert the video browser into doing it by putting stubs in the /mythtv/video directory...

Yep that would be what I would like to do. Thanks Liv2Cod for the links, I quickly looked them over as I have to leave shortly, but look to be a vauble sorce of information for me. I will look them over better tonight when I get a chance.

See this topic in the MythTV Users mailing list over at Gossamer Threads:
http://www.gossamer-threads.com/lists/mythtv/users/86779

I *knew* I'd played from ISO loopbacks before, which means that not only can this be done, but that it's a relatively straight forward hack.