Hi, Why will Windows 7 not allow Media Streamers such as the Xbox360, Dma2100, etc to stream VIDEOTS (.VOB/IFO) type files? As Windows 7 clearly allows these type of files by default on the PC Desktop version via the 'Movie Library'. I thought the whole point of an extender was to mimic the behaviour of the Desktop version 'exactly'?
VOB2MPG convert Video TitleSets (VOBs in VIDEO_TS folders) to mpegs. Features: * Choice of titles to extract * Choice of chapters to extract in a title * Ability to re-order chapters * Handle vob id changes in a title * Handle DVD angles * Chapter preview * Audio stream preview and extraction *.
Why should people have to waste alot of time using silly Transcoders & Encoders (Transcode360, Vaders plug-in) and lose DVD Menu structures/Chapter Points/Sync issues, when Windows should allow the function in the first place. I could understand Microsoft not allowing streaming of VIDEOTS via Vista MCE as the desktop version on Vista MCE did NOT support the 'Movie Library' function NATIVELY. For Vista to show a Movie Library, a hack had to be applied, which enabled the 'DVD Gallery'. Almost every other half decent video streamer out there allows this simple function. There have been thousands and thousands of posts regarding this on various forums (The GreenButton/Australian MCE, etc) and it is a function many would appreciate. Will Microsoft now allow the streaming of these files since Windows 7 now natively supports VIDEOTS via the Movie Library? I look forward to any info regarding this.
I think the main reason why it's not implemented is due to licensing/copyright issues. (and a 'major' company that recently released software to do something similar to this was sued).
I don't think I've ever heard of a legitimate use for this function other than for people to play pirated/ripped dvd's. (and even if you are somehow allowed to rip the dvd to a single machine - playing it accross the network to other devices is definitely considered to be outside this fair use). I'm sure many will come forward and claim its so they can watch home produced dvd's - but seriously doubt this is their real reason.
(and the workaround for this scenario is to play it directly on the internal dvd drive on the xbox360 or the dma2200). Niall Niall Ginsbourg - MVP Windows Media Center - Australia. Hi, Thanks for your reply. My point is that Windows 7 'Movie Library' DOES allow you to play the ripped DVDs (VIDEOTS). So obviously Microsoft has overcome any licensing/copyright issues, otherwise Movie Library would not allow you to play such files natively.
Now, since Windows 7 Movie Library allows us to play these types of files, then why not the extender? All we want to do on the extender is play the same files Windows 7 allows us to play on the Desktop Media Center.
I don't think playing the media over the network should affect the legality of the content. If it is legal/allowed to play it on the desktop, then it should be legal to play it on a movie extender (fully functional Movie Library with VIDEOTS Support). Also, I don't think that the majority of the divx, xvid, mkv, mp3 and many other files that most people tend to use with their media servers are legal.but Microsoft is now allowing them. (Vista did not allow a Movie Library.so there was no case for it to allow extenders to support it.but Windows 7 does.so come on Microsoft.get your act together and sort this massive problem out). Mobilewares said: I don't think I've ever heard of a legitimate use for this function other than for people to play pirated/ripped dvd's.
Well Mr Ginsbourg, let me make sure you've heard about at least one as I'm an amateur videographer and producing DVD's is as common to me as is spewing suppositions about media usage is to you. And yes, I am claiming I indeed do watch 'home produced' DVD's. And you can stop rolling your eyes now please.
Ever heard of independent film(makers) who couldn't care less if you watch their movies or documentaries on a standalone player or ripped your copy to a computer? You see it is not only big name studios that use this medium for distribution, it is - believe it or not - quite common. And in case you are wondering, yes I do have a library of circa 150 big house movie DVD's and of course I would like to have consolidated and convenient access to my collection as well. Who wouldn't?
I'd like to rip them all to HDD for obvious reasons but I guess, this fact alone somehow makes me a criminal. Of course I can just play them on a standalone DVD or my 360, as a matter of fact until I built an HTPC that is what I had been doing. Huge PITA, and since over the years I've amassed quite a collection it would be nice to be able to have the Media Center, be a Media Center not some kind of part. Do you think those who partake in an activity you describe are being stopped by this little inconvenience? You jest Sir - and that's the polite way of putting it. Your statement (whatever the basis for it) shows complete ignorance, and by your misguided logic, we should actually be prohibited from using computers altogether, because let's face it, most of the people use them to pirate stuff, no? I'm certain you yourself have committed piracy more than once and there's no point denying it.
I know it, you know it, and so does everyone else. The simple fact is MS has no cojones to do the right thing and actually profit from it. If they were so convinced piracy was the only way people get access to and consume media they would not have produced a Media Center, period. Why single out a ripped DVD? What about music and images?
They have copyright attached to them too you know. I guess music labels, producers and photographers did not have pockets deep enough to cozy up to the Redmond Brigade. Damn, Scooby666UK, man you hit it right on the head. I bow to you. I feel everyones pain. Why doesn't VOB streaming work. I can't believe it, It's r idiculous!!!
You only have to search the web for 10 seconds and see the thousands of questions relating to this issue. I use 3 xbox 360's myself for the SOLE purpose of distributing content, hell i don't care about the games - to a point. I just want my video's/movies where and when i want them and its SOOO frustrating that VOB's won't stream. The countless programs and how-to's out there to get various kinds of streaming going is JUST not called for, (rip it, rename and delete this, hack that, come on!). Microsoft should resolve this.
I can't believe it! If your xbox 360 is not signed in to xbox live at the time of playing a divx movie it WON'T be able to download the codec.
SO YOU CAN'T play it. Just like that. How lame, why is the codec not built in.
Too bad if your net is down or you happen to take your xbox with you on holidays with no net access. You loose end of story. Microsoft speaks of providing user experiences that enrich our lives, and for the most part provide some great ways to do so, like the media extenders YET I can't take an off the shelf piece of media, like a DVD from my cabinet and simply stream in my home using a MEDIA EXTENDER. Come on Microsoft. Listen to the people.
![Torrent vob2mpg v3.0 projects Torrent vob2mpg v3.0 projects](/uploads/1/2/5/4/125479972/789465135.png)
Do it right or Not at all!!! I watched a Microsoft Keynote demo'ing windows 7 and the guys giving the demo said that windows 7 will transcode on the fly to devices that don't support the codec. DON'T LEAVE US HANGING Microsoft.
Hear the cries ladies and gentlemen! Hear the cries. They break, i fix. Mobilewares said: I don't think I've ever heard of a legitimate use for this function other than for people to play pirated/ripped dvd's. Well Mr Ginsbourg, let me make sure you've heard about at least one as I'm an amateur videographer and producing DVD's is as common to me as is spewing suppositions about media usage is to you. And yes, I am claiming I indeed do watch 'home produced' DVD's. And you can stop rolling your eyes now please.
Ever heard of independent film(makers) who couldn't care less if you watch their movies or documentaries on a standalone player or ripped your copy to a computer? You see it is not only big name studios that use this medium for distribution, it is - believe it or not - quite common. And in case you are wondering, yes I do have a library of circa 150 big house movie DVD's and of course I would like to have consolidated and convenient access to my collection as well.
Who wouldn't? I'd like to rip them all to HDD for obvious reasons but I guess, this fact alone somehow makes me a criminal.
Of course I can just play them on a standalone DVD or my 360, as a matter of fact until I built an HTPC that is what I had been doing. Huge PITA, and since over the years I've amassed quite a collection it would be nice to be able to have the Media Center, be a Media Center not some kind of part. Do you think those who partake in an activity you describe are being stopped by this little inconvenience? You jest Sir - and that's the polite way of putting it. Your statement (whatever the basis for it) shows complete ignorance, and by your misguided logic, we should actually be prohibited from using computers altogether, because let's face it, most of the people use them to pirate stuff, no? I'm certain you yourself have committed piracy more than once and there's no point denying it.
I know it, you know it, and so does everyone else. The simple fact is MS has no cojones to do the right thing and actually profit from it. If they were so convinced piracy was the only way people get access to and consume media they would not have produced a Media Center, period. Why single out a ripped DVD? What about music and images? They have copyright attached to them too you know.
I guess music labels, producers and photographers did not have pockets deep enough to cozy up to the Redmond Brigade. Haven't visited this forum for a few weeks - and was a little suprised to see this. Ok - I'm not getting involved in a bun fight here - and sorry if you took offence to what I said. 8) I occasionally make my own videos too - but never really felt hampered by this limitation in MC. There's a number of alternatives which still allow you to utilize your own made content on Media Center extenders -Simply encode it to any of the supported formats.
Windows 7 offers great support for most of the popular codecs and file formats now (MPG2/4, WMV, WTV, H264 and others. I think even DivX/XVid is supported too). You then will be able to use the inbuilt MC Video Library (or even Movie Library) to access your content. The good thing is you won't be limited by the outdated resolution/encoding that DVD offers (which is only MPEG2 and vastly inferior compression/quality to whats around these days). Burn additional copies of your discs.
Not optimal and more messy of course - but you are talking. Hi - Just to add some more thoughts here regarding the.VOB playback. I'm assuming most of you know that with a few hacks - you can directly play the VOB's back as straight MPEG files on extenders - but you lose the interactivity - and recreating this is quite complex. The majority of extender's (XBX360 is slightly different) - do 2 things. They provide a Remote Desktop like client to an additional Media Center process running on your Host Media Center machine (when you are using the MC UI/Addins etc) - which runs at a very low frame rate (even with fast wired network you're still probably talking 1-2 fps). Secondly - when you go to watch content - your host Media Center machine streams this content to the extender - which switches into streaming playback mode - which (dumbly) plays back whatever it's being sent.
The XBOX360 (when running in MC Extender Mode) has some additional tricks where the UI/MCPL layer can be rendered locally by the console - but essentially everything you are doing/running with it is still running on the PC (and the xbox360 is there to assist with the local rendering of the UI). Additionally - the MCPL rendering offered by the Platform does has a number of limitations (which aren't an issue for Media Center UI's/TV Watching) - but don't support the bits required for DVD playback requirements (ie multiple overlayed video viewports/audio tracks, specific support for dvd only buttons etc). For some extenders which also have a local DVD Player - the DVD Playback is completely independant of Media Center - and you're actually running a completely different piece of embedded software locally. (which has nothing to do with MC - and is sourced/licensed by the manufacturer). So to add this full dvd playback - with 2 way interactivity, overlay/subtitles, etc (not just plain video streaming anymore) - over the extender - and whilst still inside the Media Center UI - it's quite a fair bit more complicated. (and actually technically well outside the scope of what Media Center is capable of doing).
I suppose that MS could have possibly do some remote desktop / screen capture hack - which streams you the DVD UI/Menu's at 1-2 fps whilst still allowing for full interactivity - but it would be a really lousy experience. I'd probably think it's a lot more likely that the dvd streaming over the network could be enabled by the standalone DVD players contained in the extenders. (ie Linksys needs to support DVD media from network as well as just from local drive on their DMA2200 - a much smaller change than whats required on the MC side). My 2 cents anyway. Niall Niall Ginsbourg - MVP Windows Media Center - Australia.
As somebody who does a lot of work with video (DVD and otherwise) and somebody who has over 250 DVDs in their collection I feel Microsoft has to start providing support for DVD collections natively in thier products. Yes, they can and do play single DVDs when loaded into a DVD drive, but I have a Media PC, 2 netbooks, and have been considering purchasing an Xbox as a HTPC for my living room. From the sounds of this conversation, I won't be purchasing an Xbox any time soon.
This is quite sad because I recently found out that Netflix supports Xbox now as well. If a company like Netflix can feel safe streaming DVD/Bluray movies to an Xbox when all they do is movies, Microsoft should feel safe doing the same thing as well. As for the legal issues involved I don't care. Microsoft should not be a legal enforcer of any kind. If they're taking up this mantel then I'm ashamed of them, and will be considering Apple for all future PC purcahses (Apple despite their support of DRM iPod music has recently been pushing for an end to DRM). Microsoft should support the features and software their customers want and let the law enforcement people handle the legal aspects of it. Nothing Microsoft does will ever end piracy of any kind.
Websites like the Pirate's Bay and the hundreds of bit torrent clients out their make it impossible unless the Mafi-AA manage to abolish the Internet. Until Microsft gets off their arses people should look into and, or pay for sofware like Baddaboom which convert your VIDEOTS VOBs into pretty much any format that you like. Some of the formats even support menus. Before I upgraded to Win7 I used AutoMVK to transcode all my DVDs to WMV so I could share/stream them between my various PCs.
Since I purchases the DVDS and are not giving them away to anyone (unless you count my wife) the MPAA can go screw themselves if they don't like it. I feel that it's fairuse at best, and civil disobedience at worst.
Brushedsteel, I see the same behavior as you do on my DMA2200. Back in the Vista Media Center days none of the vob files would even be displayed in my Video Library. Now they suddenly all show up.
It still doesn't display the menus though. So if I select the right vob file I can play it.
That's a really annoying way to watch a movie, 20 minutes at a time! Recently I've been ripping movies directly to mpg using vob2mpg.
Although the free version has been intentionally slowed down, when using it to rip directly from the dvd the bottleneck becomes the dvd rather than the crippled software. So it still rips at the same speed and you end up with an mpg file at the end of it. The mpg file will show up in the Movie Library whether I am watching natively on the media center or if I'm using the extender.
So using this method the ripping is not all that much more work and it shows up everywhere. Of course you lose the DVD menus, though I don't really care about that. In fact, it's kind of nice to bypass all the warnings and other junk they toss into the actual dvd.
VOB2MPG v3.0 & VOB2MPG v3.0 PRO VOB2MPG v3.0 & VOB2MPG v3.0 PRO are the latest versions of VOB2MPG. Previous versions of VOB2MPG have allowed users to join up and process vobs found in dvds - resulting in mpeg files suitable for playing or authoring.
VOB2MPG v3.0 (PRO) also does this but, in addition, allows users to choose, at a finer level, the DVD content to be extracted.