What do I need to have xLobby play my HD-DVD and Blu-ray .is

[mpgxsvcd]

What do I need to have xLobby play my HD-DVD and Blu-ray .iso files in POwerDVD? Do I need a special plug-in for that? Has anyone done this yet? A friend demo’d his setup and he could easily play DVD .iso files with xLobby. However, those were playing in Zoom. Is there a plugin for PowerDVD?

[jji666]

It's not a plugin as far as I know. I am not sure whether Zoom natively plays ISO files or if Daemontools is being used by your friend to mount the ISOs. But once you get past this, basically you need to configure XLobby, in filetypes, to launch PowerDVD with files of the specified extension. That has been discussed exhaustively in the forums, so do a few searches. If you search PowerDVD in this forum you'll get a lot of info on the command line parameters to pass and the extensions to associate with it.

Realize, though, that since .iso files include both BD/HDDVD and regular DVDs, this means you will override the standard Xlobby approach of launching regular DVDs with Zoomplayer, unless you create a separate category for your HD content and configure accordingly.

I suggest you consider not storing in ISO format but rather in the unpacked format of the actual video/audio/index files themselves. Then you can associate the video_ts.ifo file of a regular DVD to Zoomplayer and the .xpl file from an HDDVD with PowerDVD. This way you can use Zoom to play the standard def DVDs and powerdvd to play the HD content. Note that with the right filters Zoom will play BD files directly anyway.

The reason for the dual approach is that XL is well integrated with Zoomplayer and the controls for play, pause, FF, etc. are already built into the default XL skin. You'd need to build this control for PowerDVD. I'm sure it can be/has been done, but with Zoom that has been done for you.

Good luck!

[mpgxsvcd]

Awesome response. That is what I needed. I have become a bit of an HD snob lately so I am not sure that I will ever play an SD DVD again anyway. I will probably just let PowerDVD open all .iso files. That will work for me.

[jji666]

Yeah, me too on the HD snob issue, except that I got bored with all the HD movies after a while and the obscure stuff is still only in standard def. When all the old WWII movies and all the giant monster flicks are in HD, that will fill a few Sunday afternoons with the family.

If you get to finding a way to map transport controls and the like from XL to Power DVD so that you can use a remote or touchscreen to do more than just launch the film, I'd appreciate if you'd post your method and the mapping info. I too could ditch Zoom (although frankly it is pretty good) if the control situation was improved. I just haven't had time to work on this myself yet.