Discs and images¶
There are three ways to get a film onto the core. Pick whichever suits what you own and what you are willing to install.
Physical DVD¶
With MiSTer_DVDcss enabled and a USB optical drive
attached, insert the disc and it plays. No rip, no PC, no preparation. CSS-encrypted discs
are decrypted on the fly.
This is the least setup per disc and the most setup once — you need all three pieces from What you need, plus a drive. Worth setting the drive's region so titles start immediately rather than after a several-second key crack.
DVD image (ISO)¶
Rip the disc to an image on a PC. Both encrypted and decrypted images play — the choice affects how much you install, not what you can watch.
Keep the whole disc structure
A ripper set to extract a single title, or to transcode to MP4/MKV, throws away the menus, chapters, subtitle streams and angle data — everything this core exists to play back. Use a whole-disc mode.
Decrypted (recommended)¶
Decrypt during the rip. The resulting image plays on the bare .rbf with no key step
ever, and loads fastest.
Windows, macOS and Linux. Use Backup mode — not title conversion — with "decrypt video files" enabled. It writes a ready-to-use image.
Encrypted (raw whole-disc copy)¶
A plain sector-for-sector copy of a CSS disc works too, and is quicker and simpler to
produce — but it needs MiSTer_DVDcss and libdvdcss to play. There is no PC decrypt
step at all: the first play recovers the disc's keys and caches them under
/media/fat/dvdcss/cache, so only the first play of each disc is slow.
On the bare core an encrypted image shows CSS ENCRYPTED
and mutes rather than emitting static.
This path needs no optical drive on the MiSTer
Rip on a PC that has a drive, copy the image across, and play it. The MiSTer never needs a drive attached. See What you need.
Video CD / Super Video CD¶
No CSS is ever involved. Rip to bin/cue and select the data-track .bin — see
Video CD / SVCD for which track that is and what the format
supports.
Bare video files¶
The core also accepts .VOB, .mpg and .m2v files directly, played linearly with no
navigation. Useful for testing and for clips you have already extracted.
Where to keep them¶
The standard place is the core's own folder on the SD card:
The OSD file picker opens there, so images in that folder are the ones you see first. Create it if it does not exist — the release zip does not.
DVD images are large, though, so loading from a NAS share works and is often more practical than filling the SD card. USB storage works too. One requirement catches people out:
The share must be mounted read-write
The MiSTer framework opens disk images read-write (O_RDWR|O_SYNC) whether or not
anything writes to them, so a read-only mount fails with EACCES. You get a black
screen with the core sitting idle and no error message. The same file plays fine
from the SD card, which makes it look like a size or filesystem problem. It is not —
re-mount the share read-write.