Settings¶
Everything here is in the core's OSD. The default is shown in bold, and the defaults are chosen to be correct for most setups — on a normal HDMI installation you should not need to change anything.
Settings are saved to /media/fat/config/DVD_v3.CFG and persist across core reloads.
Main page¶
| Setting | Options | What it does |
|---|---|---|
| Aspect Ratio | Auto / 4:3 / 16:9 | Auto reads the MPEG-2 sequence header, which is what the disc says it is. Override only if a disc is authored wrongly. |
| Disc Menus | On / Off | On boots the disc's authored First Play chain and runs its menus, like a set-top player. Off skips navigation entirely and auto-plays the main feature. |
| D-Pad Seek | Off / On | Puts fixed-time seeking on the D-pad — see Controls. |
| Audio | On / Off | Master audio enable. |
| Audio Out | Decode PCM / Passthru (SPDIF+HDMI) | Decode PCM decodes in fabric and sends stereo. Passthru sends the undecoded bitstream to an AV receiver — see Bitstream passthrough. |
| SPDIF Byte Order | Normal / Swap | Applies to both bitstream outputs despite the name. If a receiver names the format but plays static, toggle this. |
| Player Language | English / 15 others | The player's language preference for menus, audio and subtitles, like a set-top player's setup screen. Discs use it to pick a default track. |
| Video Output | Auto / Interlaced / Progressive | The core's one output-mode choice: authored interlaced fields (CRTs, true-video content) or progressive (HDMI, film) — see Video Output. Auto follows MiSTer.ini. |
| 480i Deint | Bob / Weave | How the framework scaler deinterlaces when receiving 480i (HDMI, while Video Output is Interlaced). |
| Analog Aspect | Auto / Fit / Letterbox / Crop | How anamorphic content fits a 4:3 analog TV — see Analog Aspect. |
| Video Standard | Auto / NTSC / PAL | Auto detects from the stream's vertical size (480 = NTSC, 576 = PAL). |
New in v0.4.0 — your settings reset once
Video Output replaces the previous Interlaced Out and Analog Out settings
(which overlapped confusingly), and this relayout bumps the saved-settings file to
DVD_v2.CFG — settings reset once the first
time you run v0.4.0. Releases up to and including v0.3.0 still have the old pair.
Unreleased — they reset once more
A/V Offset now defaults to 0 ms instead of +100 ms. Re-ordering the values so
0 ms comes first remaps every saved setting, so the file bumps again to DVD_v3.CFG
and settings reset one further time.
Reset¶
Reset stops playback, unloads the current image, resets the DVD navigation VM, and
drops back to the bouncing-logo idle screen. Pick a new image from Load Video to play
again. A custom boot.rom logo survives the reset.
Debug page¶
The second OSD page. These are tuning and diagnostic levers. The three with sections below are the ones worth understanding before you touch them; the rest exist for narrowing down problems.
| Setting | Options | What it does |
|---|---|---|
| Debug Overlay | Off / On | In a release build this shows the menu-highlight diagnostic blocks. |
| Title VTS Tens / Title VTS Units | 0 / Auto | Forces a specific title set instead of the auto-selected one. Diagnostic, for discs where the wrong title is picked with Disc Menus off. |
| Frame Drop | On / Off | Leave this on. See below. |
| A/V Sync | On / Off | Off stops scheduling both picture and sound against the disc's timestamps. Diagnostic only — see below. |
| Force 4:3 Subpics | Off / On | Forces subpicture geometry to 4:3 for discs that author it inconsistently. |
| Line-21 CC | On / Off | Re-inserts closed captions on line 21 of the analog output — see Closed captions. |
| CC Test Line | Off / On | Paints the caption waveform on a visible line to prove the chain works — see the CC diagnostic. |
| Analog CSync | SMPTE / 2H | The shape of the composite sync on the analog output. SMPTE is the default and is what a broadcast signal carries. Change it only if your television or scaler is unhappy — see Analog / CRT output. |
| Film 24p Out | Auto / Off / On | 23.976 Hz output for film content — see Film (24p). |
| A/V Offset | 0 ms / −200 / −100 / −50 / +50 / +100 / +150 / +200 | Lip-sync trim. |
Frame Drop¶
Default On, and it should stay on.
The inherited MPEG-2 decoder has a motion-compensation and IDCT throughput ceiling, and on the heaviest content it can fall behind the display cadence. The frame-rate governor absorbs this by dropping a B-frame to stay in step. B-frames are never used as references, so the picture cannot be corrupted by this, and in practice it is not something you notice.
It is also how the player catches up when it has fallen behind the disc's own timeline: advancing past a frame is the only way to recover time that has already been lost. With Frame Drop off there is no such mechanism, so on heavy content the picture simply runs progressively later and lip sync drifts with it. The Off position exists to isolate the governor when diagnosing a pacing problem, not as a quality setting.
A/V Sync¶
Default On, and it should stay on.
Unreleased
This setting was called Audio Genlock in v0.4.0 and earlier. It was renamed because the old name described only half of what it does — and the half it named had not been true for some time.
With it on, everything the player shows you — picture, sound, subtitles, menu highlights, captions and bitstream passthrough — is presented at the time the disc asks for, measured against one clock. That is what lip sync is on this core.
Off switches that scheduling off wholesale, for video as well as audio: pictures are shown as soon as they are decoded rather than when they are due, and sound plays as soon as it is available. The result is a player with no lip sync at all. It is not a fallback for sync problems and it will not improve one.
What it is for is answering one question quickly: if a disc misbehaves and it behaves differently with A/V Sync off, the problem is in the player's timing rather than in reading or decoding the disc. That is worth a great deal when a bug can only be reproduced on someone else's disc, which is why the setting still has a row.
A/V Offset¶
Default 0 ms. There should be no need to change it.
Unreleased
This default was +100 ms in v0.4.0 and earlier. That was the correct null for a player whose clock was anchored on the demux front, which left audio about 100 ms early; the clock is now anchored on the picture actually being displayed, so the correction is no longer needed and would over-correct by the same amount.
It shifts audio relative to video, positive meaning audio later. If you genuinely need it, the thing to know is that it binds at start and re-start events only — changing it mid-title does nothing until the next seek, chapter jump or reload.
If lip sync is wrong in a way this does not fix, that is a bug rather than a setting; Troubleshooting has the cases that are known.
Settings that reset after an update¶
Saved settings live in /media/fat/config/DVD_v3.CFG, where v3 is a layout version.
When a release changes the OSD option layout incompatibly, that number is bumped, and your settings fall back to the defaults rather than being silently misread — an old file's bits would otherwise land on different options. Your previous file is left on the card, ignored, and can be deleted.
This replaces the older "please delete your config file" release note. If your settings reset after an update, that is why, and it happens once per layout change.