Compatibility¶

What plays, what does not, and what is untested. Current as of v0.4.0.

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
`.VOB` / `.mpg` / `.m2v`	Linear playback, no navigation

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
3:2 pulldown / film cadence	Supported, automatic

Sub-720 content is scaled to fill the analog output in fabric — SIF gets a 2× line repeat plus a 352→720 stretch; SVCD, sub-D1 DVD (704, 544) and any other sub-720 width get the horizontal fill. HDMI is unaffected and keeps the framework scaler's cleaner upscale. See Analog and CRT output.

Audio¶

Covered in full on Audio formats. In short: AC-3 (all channel modes) and MP2 and LPCM decode in the core; DTS is passthrough-only; AC-3 1+1 dual mono is deliberately refused; the MPEG-2 multichannel MP2 extension is unverified.

Two limits worth knowing: LPCM is 48 kHz stereo, and 20/24-bit tracks play but are truncated to 16 bits, so there is real fidelity loss on high-bit-depth music discs. 96 kHz and multichannel LPCM are not supported — 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.

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.

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.

Seeking on a seamless-branch disc is unreliable. Some special editions store two cuts of the film — theatrical and extended — woven together in the same part of the disc, and the player chooses between them as it goes. Seeking into a woven stretch can drop you into the wrong cut, and the elapsed time will not match where you actually are. Normal playback of these discs is fine; it is only seeking that is affected. Chapter skip is the reliable way to move around one of these discs for now. Tracked as issue #49.

One large class of this was fixed in 0.2.1

Many discs — interactive ones especially — build menus so that every button sends the same instruction, and a small hidden program on the disc decides where you actually go based on which button you pressed. The core did not run that program, so every option led to the same place, or the menu showed LINK FAIL and went nowhere.

Six discs in a 505-disc library went from failing at startup to reaching their menus normally, four of which nobody had ever reported. If you tried a disc before 0.2.1 and it misbehaved this way, it is worth trying again.

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.

Very demanding scenes may drop a frame. The inherited decoder has a motion-compensation and IDCT throughput ceiling and can fall behind on the heaviest content. The frame-rate governor drops a B-frame to stay in step. B-frames are never used as references, so the picture cannot be corrupted, and in practice this is not something you notice. PAL has less headroom because the frames are taller.

Closed captions are analog-only and need a television that decodes them — see Closed captions. Roughly 1 disc in 6 carries them.

PAL on an analog CRT is implemented but unconfirmed — the 576i timings are derived by analogy with the hardware-proven NTSC ones and no PAL CRT was available to test them. PAL over HDMI is confirmed working.

Unreleased

One extra part of this is unconfirmed on PAL as of the next release: which of the two interlaced fields the television treats as the first one. The composite sync now carries the full standard vertical block on both standards, and the shape of it is correct for 625 lines — but the choice of which field leads was measured on NTSC and applied to both. If a PAL CRT shows the two fields interleaved the wrong way round, that is a known gap and a report would settle it.

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

In Passthru, menus with no background audio drop to PCM — the receiver may show "decoder off" until the next menu with sound. Authored silence has no bitstream to carry; the receiver re-acquires in under a second when audio returns.

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.