Foobar & DVD-A playback (metabase)

[winopener]

Was able to set up a complete system on the netbook with 5.1 out capabilities and it's playing DVD-A with Foobar. Seems that the days of going in&out with a pack of disks are finally going over...
Along with the dvd-a decoder plugin, there was also a dvd-a metabase directory. Found out a 2011 metabase file on sourceforge and installed, and it shows correctly the "Led Zeppelin - How the west was won" tracks.
I don't know if the metabase xml approach is the best one, of i'm missing out something, however the album list does read the basic ISO 9660 LABEL on the dvd-a, so it means the artist / title is totally screwed out.
Any suggestion on how to make more "human-readable" the entire thing?
Has been attempted a approach in the style of the CUESHEET, where there are album, artist, tracks etc... and a pointer to a file?

 

[STLJLC]

I can't answer your questions, but I have one of my own and hopefully can give your thread a bump at the same time (or apologize for the hijack, depending on how you look at it).

I'm done trying to figure out how to stream my media through Roku. So I'm taking the direct approach. I have a tower computer. Media archive (.flac, .vob, .iso, etc.) I'm going to to tie directly into my multimedia receiver, and play directly to the 5.1 system, hdtv, etc. So the two questions are:

1. Any recommendations on the best - affordable - sound card or other music interface that will let me output high-quality 5.1, preferably through an HDMI?

2. What software should I be experimenting with that will be the most versatile player from a multi-channel point of view? I have not taken a look at Foobar. Right now I've been experimenting with VLC, which plays most of my audio-content, including the .iso of quad stuff. Ultimately I'd like to be able to rip DVDs, DVD-As (if possible) and BluRay, and have them all play digitally out to my system. (Winopener - have you had good experience with Foobar playing multichannel out of your netbook, and do you play more formats than just DVD-A?)


(Edit: One less-important consideration is whether I'll be able to remote-control the software without the use of a 'go-to-my-pc' style app. And I think VLC has that capability. It would be nice to have an Ipad app that puts all content at my fingertips, but I am less concerned about this.)

 

[STLJLC]

winopener: I'm all set. Bought a graphics card, and am configured to run foobar to play dvd-a straight from the hard-drive through the system with HDMI. So I've looked at the metabase issue, but I can't find the dvd-a metabase plugin to experiment with. I found a metabase that accompanies the SACD plugin on fubar. It looks like maybe there was a dvd-a metabase on sourceforge at one time, but maybe taken down. Do you have a link to what you downloaded? I was going to take a crack at seeing if it could be made more "human readable."

 

[winopener]

http://sourceforge.net/projects/dvdmetabase/

link does work

 

[mandrix]

@STLJLC sorry I didn't see your post sooner. I've been using the graphics card in my HTPC with HDMI out for a long time, the machine has no sound card at all. In fact none of the 5 pc's in the house have soundcards, although I use the built in Realtek on my "main" rig to plug into an AVR and a DTS 610.

 

[STLJLC]

http://sourceforge.net/projects/dvdmetabase/

Thanks. I checked this out, and am still in the process of getting it configured, so I'll report back later on how it works. I would note though that when I was reading closely through the documentation, it looks like this metabase was created by the author to deal primarily with DVD-V, not DVD-A? I agree with you that a more accessible DVD-A metabase along the lines of a cue sheet would be a very good idea.

 

[STLJLC]

@STLJLC sorry I didn't see your post sooner. I've been using the graphics card in my HTPC with HDMI out for a long time, the machine has no sound card at all. In fact none of the 5 pc's in the house have soundcards, although I use the built in Realtek on my "main" rig to plug into an AVR and a DTS 610.

This is what I ended up doing, going with a graphics card and HDMI out. I am very pleased with it. Foobar definitely seems to be the way to go in terms of playing the largest selection of quad/multichannel formats. Thanks for the input.

 

[mandrix]

Sure. I use MCE for playback of some things, mostly surround music that I convert to .MKV and play as a movie since that seems to be the only way I can get MCE to recognize it. Other music I use Foobar for playback, sometimes Arcsoft TMT. I would probably skip MCE altogether but I use it with my Hauppauge HD PVR to record tv shows along with DVBLink drivers for MCE. Not sure what MCE is going to be like in Windows 8, but since it will be a free download to a cheap upgrade I'll know in October I guess.
Now if Foobar ever expanded into video it would probably be the only player I used, if it did it as well as it does music.

 

[STLJLC]

link does work

Ok, if I understand right, I think that link was to a metabase for video dvds. I've been experimenting with the metabase that I did find here (http://sourceforge.net/projects/dvdadecoder/files/dvda_metabase/). (I think this link was down when I made my 7/22 post.)

It is difficult to tell if it is working. I have a few actual DVD-As, and when I put in Court of the Crimson King, it recognizes the artist/title/year/label. But I don't understand these matters enough to know if that's pulling from the .xml files in the metabase, or just reading from some metadata on the disc.

In the meantime, I have also been taking a look at the playlist option in foobar. Nearly all of my multichannel music is on the hard drive in either DVDA-R or SACD-R format. I notice that if you pull in a file (mine are in .iso format) to your playlist, it usually does not disply the information. So in the playlist, it may show the following as an example:

[AEROSMIT #01] Lf-Rf-Ls-Rs 24/88200 + C-LFE 24/88200
[AEROSMIT #02] Lf-Rf-Ls-Rs 24/88200 + C-LFE 24/88200
[AEROSMIT #03] Lf-Rf-Ls-Rs 24/88200 + C-LFE 24/88200
[AEROSMIT #04] Lf-Rf-Ls-Rs 24/88200 + C-LFE 24/88200
[AEROSMIT #05] Lf-Rf-Ls-Rs 24/88200 + C-LFE 24/88200
[AEROSMIT #06] Lf-Rf-Ls-Rs 24/88200 + C-LFE 24/88200
[AEROSMIT #07] Lf-Rf-Ls-Rs 24/88200 + C-LFE 24/88200
[AEROSMIT #08] Lf-Rf-Ls-Rs 24/88200 + C-LFE 24/88200
[AEROSMIT #09] Lf-Rf-Ls-Rs 24/88200 + C-LFE 24/88200

From there, you can edit the info for each track by right-clicking and changing the properties. After that, each track will display the correct information. For example:

Aerosmith - [Toys In the Attic #01] Toys in the Attic
Aerosmith - [Toys In the Attic #02] Uncle Salty
Aerosmith - [Toys In the Attic #03] Adam's Apple
Aerosmith - [Toys In the Attic #04] Walk This Way
Aerosmith - [Toys In the Attic #05] Big Ten Inch Record
Aerosmith - [Toys In the Attic #06] Sweet Emotion
Aerosmith - [Toys In the Attic #07] No More No More
Aerosmith - [Toys In the Attic #08] Round and Round
Aerosmith - [Toys In the Attic #09] You See Me Crying

If you save the playlist, it generates a file with the extension .fpl, and can be edited in a text editor. For the above example, the code for this playlist looks in part like this:

file://SACD to DVDA Blogspot\Aerosmith - Toys in the Attic (5.1)\SA2DA-ATITA.ISO ARTIST TITLE ALBUM TRACKNUMBER dvda_title dvda_titleset dvda_track Aerosmith Toys in the Attic Toys In the Attic 1 samplerate 88200 channels 6 bitspersample 24 codec MLP encoding lossless bitrate 12701 file://SACD to DVDA Blogspot\Aerosmith - Toys in the Attic (5.1)\SA2DA-ATITA.ISO Uncle Salty 2 file://SACD to DVDA Blogspot\Aerosmith - Toys in the Attic (5.1)\SA2DA-ATITA.ISO Adam's Apple ..... etc.

I haven't quite deciphered it all yet, but it looks very straightforward, and could probably be used to create exactly the type of cue-sheet system winopener is talking about. Of course the only way that such a playlist could be shared back and forth would be if standardized file structures were used, which is kind of unrealistic. But, in all likelihood what I'll be doing is importing my entire drive full of DVD-A rips and working up a formatted play list.

 

[winopener]

Maybe defining a variable such as %artist% is possible; will be good to define the full path as %iso_source%.

 

[STLJLC]

If you could define variables and pass those terms down into the playlist, that would be great. That way if music on the drive are in folders that use the same naming conventions, you could just change the path at the top, and perhaps everyone could use a common playist file. I'll probably spend a bit more time looking at this. Unfortunately, it doesn't look like there is a way to use the playlist to point to any images such as cover, etc. But I'd be happy with just a GUI that allows me to scroll through my collection and will properly display artist and track information.

 

[winopener]

The playlist doesn't have information for cover art, however you can instruct foobar to look for a specific file, such as cover.jpg or folder.jpg.