Compatibility

What plays, what does not, and what is untested. Current as of v0.9.1.

Formats

	Status
DVD-Video, ISO9660 image	Full support — menus, navigation, chapters, subtitles, angles
DVD-Video, physical disc	Full support, with MiSTer_DVDcss
DVD-Video, CSS-encrypted	Full support, with MiSTer_DVDcss + libdvdcss
UDF-only image	Not supported — reports UNSUPPORTED IMAGE
Video CD / SVCD	Basic playback — no menus/PBC; image or physical disc
.VOB / .mpg / .m2v	Linear playback, no navigation
.wav audio file	16-bit stereo PCM at 44.1/48 kHz only — audio, no picture
Audio CD (physical)	Plays with track skip and a progress bar, needs MiSTer_DVDcss
Audio CD image (.cue + .bin or .wav)	Plays exactly as the physical disc does, needs MiSTer_DVDcss — see Playing a .cue. .wav tracks must be 16-bit stereo 44.1 kHz; MP3/FLAC sheets are refused
VCD/SVCD image via .cue	Same playback as the .bin, without having to pick the track; also plays MODE2/2336 rips. Needs MiSTer_DVDcss
CHD images	Not supported

ISO9660 only

Practically every DVD-Video image is ISO9660 (usually with a UDF structure alongside it, which is fine). A UDF-only image will not load. If your ripper offers the choice, take the default.

Video

	Status
MPEG-2, 720×480 (NTSC) and 720×576 (PAL)	Well tested — the main path
MPEG-1 SIF, 352×240 and 352×288	Well tested
SVCD, 480 wide	Well tested
Other DVD-legal sizes — 704×480, 352×480 half-D1	Accepted, little or no testing
NTSC / PAL detection	Automatic from the stream
Progressive and native 480i/576i output	Supported
Native 240p / 288p for VCD and MPEG-1 SIF	Supported, automatic on the analog raster
PAL 576i on an analog CRT	Confirmed working on real PAL sets
3:2 pulldown / film cadence	Supported, automatic

Sub-720 content is scaled to fill the analog output in fabric — SVCD, sub-D1 DVD (704, 544) and any other sub-720 width get a horizontal stretch. SIF-height content (352×240 / 352×288) instead gets a native 240p/288p raster when the analog output is running, so it is sent at its own height with no line doubling at all — on a CRT that is the usual console-style 240p, and over HDMI the framework scaler receives the original frame rather than a doubled one. See Analog and CRT output.

Busy video keeps up on both Video Output settings. Earlier builds dropped a frame or two a second in the busiest concert and TV discs on Progressive output, because the display's memory reads competed with the decoder. The display now reads about a third as much per line, and every disc measured keeps up on Progressive and on Interlaced, including its busiest scenes. The one exception is by design: Film 24p Out = On with 29.97 fps video (see Troubleshooting).

Colours use the standard-definition (BT.601) conversion, the one DVD-Video specifies. Most discs do not label their colour encoding. Earlier builds converted those discs with the high-definition (BT.709) formula, which tinted skin slightly green and put subtitles in a different colour space from the picture. Video that does carry a colour label, such as an .mpg encoded for BT.709, is converted the way its label says.

Audio

Covered in full on Audio formats. In short: AC-3 (all channel modes) and DTS (its core stream, up to 5.1, to stereo) and MP2 and LPCM decode in the core; DTS extensions (DTS-ES, 96/24) reach a receiver only through Passthru; AC-3 1+1 dual mono plays its two programmes on the left and right; the MPEG-2 multichannel MP2 extension is unverified.

WAV files play through the same PCM path (16-bit stereo, 44.1/48 kHz); unsupported shapes are refused rather than played as noise, and they play as PCM on both outputs whichever way Audio Out is set.

LPCM plays in every form DVD-Video allows: 48 or 96 kHz, 16/20/24-bit, 1 to 8 channels. Two limits are worth knowing. The output is stereo: multichannel LPCM is downmixed, because the board wires a single two-channel audio line to the HDMI transmitter (which is also why 5.1 must leave as a compressed bitstream). It is also 16-bit: 20/24-bit tracks are truncated, so there is real fidelity loss on high-bit-depth music discs. 96 kHz is filtered down to 48 kHz unless hdmi_audio_96k=1 runs the HDMI link at 96 kHz.

Navigation

Working: First Play, root and title menus, PCI/HLI button highlights, D-pad navigation following the authored link graph, subpictures, chapters via the PTT tables, multi-angle, seamless-branch interleaved cells, still frames, and audio/subtitle/angle/language selection. Discs that pick the camera angle themselves — typically to show a title card or credits in your chosen language — are followed rather than overridden.

A disc's own checks get honest answers about the player:

• Region. The core reports a region the disc allows, so a disc from any region passes its own region check, rather than showing its "wrong region" screen.
• TV shape. Discs are told the shape of your TV from your output settings: whatever Analog Aspect describes on the interlaced analog output, and widescreen on Progressive and HDMI unless you set Analog Aspect to Letterbox or Crop there. Discs that carry both a 4:3 and a 16:9 copy of an intro or menu therefore play the 16:9 one on a widescreen setup.
• Audio. Discs are told which audio formats the core can actually play (Dolby Digital, MPEG audio, and DTS).
• Where you are. Discs are told the chapter and the part of the title that is playing, so a scene-selection or main menu opened mid-film can open on the chapter you were watching.

Discs authored without a First Play program start where other players start them: at the first program of the disc's top-level menu.

Damaged navigation files. Every DVD carries a backup copy of each navigation file (.BUP). When a disc's main copy can't be read, the core uses the backup, as set-top players do. See Troubleshooting.

Not implemented: parental-control enforcement and UOP enforcement (the flags a disc uses to forbid skipping something). In practice this means the core lets you skip things a set-top player would not.

Known limitations

Interactive DVD games are incomplete. Some game discs mis-navigate their dispatcher logic, and individual minigames can misbehave. Film and TV discs are the supported path.

Some discs offer no subtitles in an alternate viewing mode. A few titles build a second version of the film as its own program chain — The Matrix's "Follow the White Rabbit" is the best-known — and that version can declare a different subpicture stream from the main one, or none at all. Where the disc offers no subtitle stream for the mode you are in, the subtitle button will not produce subtitles. This matches a set-top player.

Changed in v0.5.0

Before this change the player would show such a stream anyway, using a colour palette that was never meant for it — the text came out as flat grey with no black outline and was very hard to read. It is now simply not shown.

Audio played by the MiSTer's Linux side is not heard while this core is loaded. The framework path that mixes Linux-side audio (a background-music script, for example) into a core's output is left out of this core to free logic for the player itself. Every disc, file and audio CD the core plays is decoded in the FPGA, so nothing the player does depends on it.

Some discs are not laid out in the order you watch them. A small number of discs — ordinary films among them, not just box sets — store one part of the feature at the far end of the disc from where it plays. Playback, chapter skip, seeking and the time readout are all unaffected. The only sign is cosmetic: one chapter notch on the seek bar can sit at the opposite end of the track from where that chapter falls in the film, because the bar shows position on the disc rather than position in the story. A seek can also land slightly earlier than the bar showed if the target falls in a gap between two parts.

A game disc that repeats the same question

Some game discs put their randomisation setup in the boot sequence, and pressing Menu to skip the intro jumps past it — so the game repeats one question. That is how the disc is authored; a real player and libdvdnav do the same thing. Let the intro play.

Closed captions are analog-only and need a television that decodes them — see Closed captions. About 6 NTSC discs in 10 carry them.

Changing the audio track inside a disc menu silences the menu's audio until you leave the menu.

Fixed after v0.6.1

Some copy-protected physical discs could stall for a long time. A few discs, such as the DVD in the OZ: The Great and Powerful Blu-ray combo pack, contain deliberately unreadable sectors that a real player never reads. With Disc Menus off the player could be sent into them, and the drive then spends about 30 seconds retrying each one while the MiSTer stops responding. Ejecting the disc recovers straight away. The player no longer reads those sectors. A decrypted image of the same disc was never affected.

Reporting a disc that does not work

Open an issue with the core version from the OSD, the disc title and region, what happens and where, and any on-screen message.

If the trouble is with menus, titles or audio tracks, you can also send the disc's navigation tables as a sub-100 KB file, which makes the problem reproducible without the disc — see Reporting a bug.

Interactive/game discs are known-incomplete, so those reports are useful but expected. A film or TV disc that does not play properly is the more surprising case and worth reporting in detail.