SageTV 7 (or HD300): Blu-ray menus/audio not working

[null_pointer_us]

SageTV 7 (final) or HD300
No BD/DVD playback software is installed; just ATI driver and codecs.

Star Trek, The Original Series (Season 1)
Blu-ray Disc release with some sort of Enhanced/Seamless modes
AnyDVD HD ripped them to a media folder on SageTV 7 media center drive.

My settings:



Both SageTV 7 and HD300 have same issues:

1) BD menu does not show up. When I go to the DVD/BD list, the disc shows up, but when I click on it an episode starts playing. Closest thing SageTV provides to a menu is the "select a chapter" button that just lists a dozen or more similar-looking internal file names.

2) No sound. Turning the volume and speakers all the way up didn't help.

Bad ripping method? Or unsupported disc/features/formats?

[gplasky]

Well for one the BD menu isn't supported by Sage. It plays from the BMDV folder structure or .iso. Both without menu support.

Gerry

[Spectrum]

As Gerry stated, the menus are not supported so it is functioning as intended in that regard. Your audio may be configured incorrectly for your setup. ie the HD300 may be set to bitstream audio via HDMI and the hdmi is attached to a stereo tv that can't decode the stream. Without knowing how things are attached though, we'll just be guessing.

Questions:
What kind of audio is the source?
How is the HD300 set to output the audio?
How is the HD300 connected to the destination device?
What kind of audio is the destination device capable of decoding?

Withi the answers to those we should be able to get you sorted.

[BobPhoenix]

1) Already stated above.
2) I get the same thing on my StarTrek BluRays but I use a HD200 so I figured it was because of DTS-MA. I ripped mine with DVDFab to single M2TS files for each episode with ALL sound tracks and just select the first AC/3 audio track when I playback. Been thinking about upgrading to a HD300 so curious if you get this resolved with your HD300.

[null_pointer_us]

Touting blu-ray support in SageTV 7 / HD300 without menus is lame.

Audio settings are probably wrong as you noted, thanks. The HD300 extenders are attached via HDMI (and bitstream) to HDTVs with external analog (stereo) speaker setups. TV audio worked so I figured the settings were fine, but I'll play around with them a bit.

Surround sound is overrated, wiring the rear channels across the room is tough, and > number of speakers implies higher cost per speaker to get comparable quality vs. stereo. So I just went with quality stereo speakers.



Plus my experience with audio in most content is just plain awful. Commercials are so effin' loud, SD ads on HD stations/discs/menus are even louder, and music/voice ratio is off so terribly in modern content that if you can hear whispers in the movie people at the other end of the house will hear the rest of the show. Why spend money on better speakers for awful content like this?

In what year do audio content and playback device producers get together to make dynamic range conversion ubiquitously plug and play, 2073? So that we can actually enjoy their hard work without scrambling for the audio remote every time the source/format/embedded-source changes? Oh, I'd like to see video dynamic range change with every other movie/series/ad so the video content varied between decent, wildly oversaturated, and mono many times per playing session. The industry would fix that like lightning. But audio? Nah, just turn the volume up or down.

[gplasky]

Originally Posted by null_pointer_us

Touting blu-ray support in SageTV 7 / HD300 without menus is lame.

Blue Ray Menu support=Licensing costs=Big Buck$$$.

Not really lame. This is the best any company can do without spending for the licensing fees. You pay what? $70-$100 for a software video player that supports Blue Ray with menu playing. The capability to play a ripped BR from a BMDV folder or an .iso on a inexpensive extender should not be underestimated.

Gerry

[null_pointer_us]

They license the menus now?!

Next we'll have to plug in a mini-USB cable before the disc cases unlock.

[gplasky]

Originally Posted by null_pointer_us

They license the menus now?!

Next we'll have to plug in a mini-USB cable before the disc cases unlock.

No silly.

Sage would need to provide a Blu-Ray decoder to have full functionality including BD Menus.

AFTER HAVING LAUNCHED exclusively by a few companies, Blu-ray is about to be licensed to the world plus dog but don't expect prices to drop.
The BD4C Licensing Group, which is made up of Mitsubishi, Thomson, Toshiba and Warner Bros, has announced that it has commenced a worldwide joint licensing program for Blu-ray and the patents needed for Blu-ray Disc (BD) decoders, encoders, recorders, players, read-only discs, recordable discs, drives and BD/DVD hybrid discs.
Basically it means that anyone who wants to make a Blu-ray bit of kit can go to one place and get all the patents they need.
License royalties under the BD4C portfolio include four cents per Blu-ray Disc, eight cents per Blu-ray/DVD hybrid disc, and $4.50 per Blu-ray player, among others.

Gerry

[null_pointer_us]

Oh, it's just patent extortion.

1. Sell a product with a one-time fee.
2. Don't indicate on the box that another purchase is required to view content.
3. Add encryption, so full content is only available with additional fees.
4. Charge player developers, disc makers, content producers, etc. per-product fees.

Which BD decoders can Sage use?

[Fuzzy]

Sage doesn't work with BD decoders. Part of the licensing requires those decoders to not be available outside the licensed software. The options for playing back BluRay with sage are to play back the playlists as currently available, or launch the rips to an external bluray player (I use ArcSoft TMT5). The latter obviously won't work with the extenders (a key reason I don't own any). Honestly, If you don't like the way BD's are licensed - don't buy them. It is their content, and they can choose to charge whatever they please.

[stanger89]

Originally Posted by null_pointer_us

Touting blu-ray support in SageTV 7 / HD300 without menus is lame.

Making Blu-ray licensing such that small guys like Sage can't license the required pieces to implement full support is even lamer. Would you rather have no BD support at all?

Audio settings are probably wrong as you noted, thanks. The HD300 extenders are attached via HDMI (and bitstream) to HDTVs with external analog (stereo) speaker setups. TV audio worked so I figured the settings were fine, but I'll play around with them a bit.

Most HDTVs don't support DTS, so you'll probably want to change the HD300 to PCM output so it will decode the audio.

Surround sound is overrated, wiring the rear channels across the room is tough, and > number of speakers implies higher cost per speaker to get comparable quality vs. stereo. So I just went with quality stereo speakers.

FWIW, I can understand the logistical complexities of surround in some setups, and can guess at the idea that it's overrated when you only have the "cheap" HTIB type systems, but a good surround system setup right is IMO just as important as good video IMO, at least for movies.

Plus my experience with audio in most content is just plain awful. Commercials are so effin' loud, SD ads on HD stations/discs/menus are even louder, and music/voice ratio is off so terribly in modern content that if you can hear whispers in the movie people at the other end of the house will hear the rest of the show. Why spend money on better speakers for awful content like this?

While I generally agree for TV, and lots of "broadcast" movies (which inevitably have significant dialnorm applied) , I completely disagree when it comes to movies on disc. While there is a lot of dynamic range, with good speakers, equipment, and room you can quite easily hear both quiet and loud passages without blowing everyone out. Having a hard time hearing quiet passages is often an acoustical problem, you have to turn the system up too loud to overcome deficiencies in the audio chain.

In what year do audio content and playback device producers get together to make dynamic range conversion ubiquitously plug and play, 2073?

I think you might be interested in Dolby Volume, look it up. Oh, and acoustical treatments.

Originally Posted by null_pointer_us

They license the menus now?!

Menu's on BD are BD-J(ava), a lot more complex than those on DVD, so yeah, it's non trivial to implement them and you need to license the JVM software to run them.

Originally Posted by null_pointer_us

Which BD decoders can Sage use?

As noted above, it doesn't, it uses industry standard Audio/Video decoders. I assume SageTV came up with their own code to follow BD playlists, which I imagine was relatively simple.

[null_pointer_us]

Originally Posted by Fuzzy

Sage doesn't work with BD decoders. Part of the licensing requires those decoders to not be available outside the licensed software. The options for playing back BluRay with sage are to play back the playlists as currently available, or launch the rips to an external bluray player (I use ArcSoft TMT5). The latter obviously won't work with the extenders (a key reason I don't own any).

Thank you for the information. BD is a waste of time, and except for the outside possibility of exclusive releases I won't be throwing any more money at that crap.

Honestly, If you don't like the way BD's are licensed - don't buy them. It is their content, and they can choose to charge whatever they please.

There are appropriate limits on the type of conditions companies can ethically put into licenses, and dictating which other products people can use (or how the original product can be used) after the sale of the content crosses that line. If you don't accept that then all I can say is you've swallowed something foul.

Selling products with hidden fees (enforced by value-removed features, e.g. DRM w/ encryption) is wrong. It also leads to situations of people buying (or receiving as gifts) crap they can't use as desired or without unnecessary inconvenience.

The practice will stop being dishonest when they put a disclaimer on the front of these boxes saying that while consumers may think they're buying the content to use on any technically-capable player, they'll be locked out of their content unless they (directly or indirectly) pay money back to the same group for a sanctioned player.

[null_pointer_us]

Originally Posted by stanger89

Making Blu-ray licensing such that small guys like Sage can't license the required pieces to implement full support is even lamer. Would you rather have no BD support at all?

No, but I refuse to be happy with less than open standards.

(I get what's been said about Sage making the best of a bad situation.)

Most HDTVs don't support DTS, so you'll probably want to change the HD300 to PCM output so it will decode the audio.

Oh, the maddening digital audio upgrade cycle. Ordinarily when you have two pieces of equipment that have proper in/out jacks for the same cable type, they'll work together. Plug it in, maybe change a setting or two, and it just works. Not so with digital audio. I got a receiver with a buncha dolby/thx/dts stuff some years ago and nothing I plugged into it ever produced audio regardless of what formats/settings I tried on the devices.

If the devices don't have compatible standards, the cable's useless. And the standards change all the time. Have you seen how many of those silly icons are plastered all over digital equipment? And how many of them are similar-looking variations on previous icons? I'd like to have stock in the companies that "invent" these things!

Analog interconnects can carry signals just fine from one part of the system to another. When and where digital connections happen to work properly -- on equipment I'd already own for other reasons -- I'll use digital connections, but shelling out money for it is a waste IMO. I bet you in 1-2 years there'll be a bunch of other specs and standards that new popular content will support and then companies will want to sell you new receivers and other components.

If someone came out with a nicely packaged digital audio receiver, with an ethernet connection and contract for regular firmware upgrades (to support the new formats), and without weird licensing/connection restrictions, then I'd consider switching to a digital receiver on the main HTPC. (SiliconDust product idea here?) I might even a little more for it, than the ~1-5% improvement in audio quality would be worth. Aside from such a product, they can shove it.

I'm fine with progress and incremental improvements, but right now they seem to be milking it like a cash cow (e.g. inflated cost vs. value).

FWIW, I can understand the logistical complexities of surround in some setups, and can guess at the idea that it's overrated when you only have the "cheap" HTIB type systems, but a good surround system setup right is IMO just as important as good video IMO, at least for movies.

That's up to you and I have no problem with people spending their money on what's important to them, but that's why I said overrated. If they would fix the volume issues so that there is a common royalty-free spec/mini-header for all devices and content formats that simply exposes some basic volume normalization/range values, the convenience, IMO, would be worth more to more people than these surround sound dts hd ma 96-bit thingamajigs they keep popping out.

While I generally agree for TV, and lots of "broadcast" movies (which inevitably have significant dialnorm applied) , I completely disagree when it comes to movies on disc. While there is a lot of dynamic range, with good speakers, equipment, and room you can quite easily hear both quiet and loud passages without blowing everyone out. Having a hard time hearing quiet passages is often an acoustical problem, you have to turn the system up too loud to overcome deficiencies in the audio chain.

Thanks, that makes sense. I'll look into it. ATM I'm just bothered it has to be adjusted at all. Stereo analog (3.5mm to 2x RCA) out to receiver with a slightly atypical 2.0+1 speaker setup: 2 floorstanding speakers with plenty of lows/mids/highs and 1 center channel speaker, all of which seemed to have good reviews and are part of the same mfr./model/year. Audio "enhancement" modes are disabled wherever I could find them; everything they fixed wrecked something else. I'll play around with the computer/receiver volume levels and channel settings, maybe something's amiss.

I think you might be interested in Dolby Volume, look it up. Oh, and acoustical treatments.

What's the brand name again? Every time I see or hear D-o-l-b-y it looks like $$$ to me.

I'm not putting another dime into digital audio unless all my equipment is compatible (SageTV HD300 and server) and all content (TV, DVD, the license-crippled BD, etc.) supports the feature and has it working properly, and the features/formats won't be obsolete in a few years. Having spent the last few years with at least one major HW/SW issue per week, now I appreciate boxes that will just sit there, working properly, collecting dust for 10-20 years until they croak.

If there is computer software that works decently with SageTV, I'll check it out. Some family members reported HD300's were saving/restoring volume levels on a per-channel basis, which would be a small step forward. I'll look for some way to enable that in the HTPC.

Menu's on BD are BD-J(ava), a lot more complex than those on DVD, so yeah, it's non trivial to implement them and you need to license the JVM software to run them.

There was a nasty license kicking around for the menus, after all.

So much for Java as an open platform, eh? Just when the community pried the thing open, Sun went belly-up and Oracle swept up the projects and put them back into corporate silence/ambiguity mode. Or maybe you mean the java-based menu format is non-trivial and under some patent coercion scheme, which sounds like another faulty software patent.

Patents are for limited protection of new production methods, e.g. tools to create products, not a legal threat to coerce consumers of those products into shelling out for extra products after the fact. Yep, I'm making a special distinction between end users and consumers who purchase to produce/resell.

As noted above, it doesn't, it uses industry standard Audio/Video decoders. I assume SageTV came up with their own code to follow BD playlists, which I imagine was relatively simple.

I intensely dislike referring to proprietary specs. as standards. The word standard is generally taken to mean something that anyone can freely implement (and freely distribute their own implementation), that is to say without royalties, litigation, and other forms of coercion. Sadly people make some proprietary stuff de facto standards, which gives them broad powers e.g. h.264, blu-ray.

[mitchedo]

Originally Posted by null_pointer_us

...I intensely dislike referring to proprietary specs. as standards. The word standard is generally taken to mean something that anyone can freely implement (and freely distribute their own implementation), that is to say without royalties, litigation, and other forms of coercion. Sadly people make some proprietary stuff de facto standards, which gives them broad powers e.g. h.264, blu-ray.

I share your dislike, but standards do not now, nor ever have been, necessarily free and open. The very fact that it is a standard means you should not be able to monkey with it. Standards cannot be truly "open".

As for being free, it really costs money to develop and implement any standard. The organizations implementing these standards have to have money to survive. If an organization can get folks to use a standard, and get them to pay for it, then that's what capitalism is all about. It drives innovation. The alternative is pretty much any Communist country that does not embrace some sort of avenue for innovators and risk-takers to keep some of the money from their labor. (Go watch the beginning of "Moscow on the Hudson" for an example of life in such a country. ...or just look at North Korea.).

DRM is the true evil of most of your concerns. If we didn't have to mess with DRM, there wouldn't be near the digital incompatibility you rant about. DRM is evil. DRM needs to go away. This does not mean we should be able to copy anything and everything without paying for it. It just means DRM is the wrong way to go about it. I think the RIAA's heavy-handed method is actually the right choice. Thieves should be the ones that are punished, not the person who simply wants to watch a movie and listen to the sound.

However, some things that are patentable these days should definitely not be patentable. You shouldn't be able to patent an idea, just the particular implementation of that idea. Nowadays, the very idea of doing something seems to be patentable, which is not right. I speak of TiVo's endless lawsuits over the "idea" that you should be able to watch a show while it is still recording. That's just insane to be able to patent such a thing. The particular lines of code to implement it? Sure. The very idea? Absolutely not.

...but this is off-topic, so I should shut up now.