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Loading a movie

Put your images in the core's folder on the SD card:

/media/fat/games/DVD/

That is where the OSD file picker opens when you choose Load Video — create the folder if it does not exist yet. Anywhere else the MiSTer file browser can reach works too — USB storage or a network share — see Where to keep them.

Accepted file types:

Extension What it is
.iso DVD-Video image, decrypted or (with the add-ons) encrypted
.cue Cue sheet for a CD rip — an audio CD or a Video CD / SVCD. Needs MiSTer_DVDcss; see Playing a .cue
.bin .img .dat Video CD / SVCD raw-sector rips — see Video CD / SVCD
.vob A single DVD program stream, played linearly
.mpg MPEG program stream (MPEG-1 or MPEG-2)
.m2v Bare MPEG-2 elementary video stream, no audio
.wav PCM audio file — 16-bit stereo, 44.1 or 48 kHz. Audio only, no picture

An .iso gives you disc menus and chapters, and a .cue gives you tracks. A .vob, .mpg or .m2v is played straight through with no menus, no chapters, and — for .m2v — no sound, because the format carries none.

Playing a .cue

A .cue sheet is the small text file a CD ripper writes next to the .bin (or .wav) files, describing where each track starts. Select the .cue and the player reads it and works out what the disc is:

  • An audio CD plays exactly as a music CD in the drive does: the bouncing logo, TR 3/12 with the time within the track, a per-track progress bar, and Next / Previous Chapter skipping tracks. Data tracks on an enhanced or mixed-mode disc are skipped.
  • A Video CD or SVCD plays as described on Video CD / SVCD — but you no longer need to know which .bin holds the movie, and any audio tracks on the disc are left out cleanly.

The sheet's files can be one .bin for the whole disc or one per track, and audio rips with one .wav per track (the way EAC writes them) work too. The .wav files must be CD audio: 16-bit stereo at 44.1 kHz. A sheet written on Windows is fine — the drive-letter paths and the letter case are sorted out for you. Keep the sheet in the same folder as its files.

A .cue needs the MiSTer_DVDcss add-on, because it is the MiSTer's own software, not the FPGA, that reads the sheet. On the bare core a .cue still shows up in the file picker, but nothing plays; select the .bin instead.

If the sheet cannot be played, the reason pops up — Cannot play this CUE sheet, followed by the problem, such as a missing file. See Troubleshooting.

Playing a .wav

A .wav plays as audio only: the bouncing logo fills the screen. The status line and a progress bar show where you are in the file, like a CD player's front panel; they start out shown, and Display hides or shows them. Pause, the seek bar and the D-pad time jumps all work as they do for video; there are no chapters.

The core plays 16-bit stereo PCM at 44.1 or 48 kHz — the CD and DVD sample rates. Anything else (mono, 24-bit, floating point, 96 kHz) is refused with UNSUPPORTED IMAGE rather than played as noise. Compressed formats — MP3, FLAC, AAC, Ogg — are not supported; there is no decoder for them in the core.

Audio Out can be left on either setting. A .wav is PCM, so it plays as PCM on both outputs even in Passthru — the same way an LPCM or MP2 track does.

The idle screen

When the core is loaded without a disc it opens the OSD file picker by itself after about a second, the way the console cores do, and a bouncing logo screensaver plays behind it until something is mounted. A bare launch is never just a black screen.

You can replace the logo with your own artwork — see Idle logo.

Starting playback

With Disc Menus on (the default), a DVD boots the way a set-top player does: the disc's First Play chain runs — copyright screens, studio idents — and then its main menu appears. Navigate with the D-pad and press B4 to select. See Controls.

With Disc Menus off, navigation is skipped entirely and the main feature auto-plays: the player picks the disc's largest title set, and within it the longest programme. On a TV disc that is usually the "play all" chain rather than the first episode. The core shows TITLE VTS nn to say which title it picked. This is the escape hatch for a disc whose menus misbehave.

Skipping the opening chain

Pressing Menu (B5) over a copyright or warning screen goes straight to the disc's main menu, before the disc has shown you one. Some discs — DVD games especially — use this boot chain to perform set up steps and may behave incorrectly if skipped. See Menu during the opening chain.

Launching from an MGL shortcut

An MGL is MiSTer's shortcut file: put one in the SD root or in a _ menu folder and it appears in the MiSTer menu, loads the core and starts a movie in one step. The DVD core supports them.

The Terminator (1984).mgl
<mistergamedescription>
  <rbf>_Other/DVD</rbf>
  <file delay="5" type="s" index="0" path="Movies/The Terminator (1984).mpg"/>
</mistergamedescription>
  • rbf — where the core lives on the SD card, without the date and .rbf.
  • type="s" and index="0" — the core's one file slot, Load Video. These do not change; any file type from the table above goes in the same slot.
  • path — relative to /media/fat/games/DVD/, or an absolute path starting with / if the file lives somewhere else (a network share, for example).
  • delay — seconds to wait after the core loads before mounting. 1 is usually enough; raise it if the file lives on a slow share.

The name of the .mgl file is what shows in the menu, so it can differ from the movie's filename.

Loading something else

Reset in the OSD stops playback, unloads the current image, resets the navigation VM, and returns to the idle screen, where you can pick a new file. A custom idle logo survives the reset.

You can also load a new file directly from Load Video while something is playing — the core cuts to black and starts the new one cleanly.

If nothing happens

A black screen with the core sitting idle and no message at all is almost always a read-only network share — see the warning in Discs and images. No message means the core never received the file; it is not the same as UNSUPPORTED IMAGE, which means the file was read and could not be played.

Anything else, the core will usually tell you: check On-screen messages and Troubleshooting.