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Troubleshooting

Symptoms and what causes them. If the core has put a message on screen, On-screen messages decodes it.

Nothing plays

Black screen, core sits idle, no error message

Almost always a read-only network share. 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 and you get silence with no diagnostic. The same file plays fine from the SD card, which makes it look like a size or filesystem problem.

Fix: re-mount the share read-write.

Why there is no message

The absence of one is the clue. UNSUPPORTED IMAGE is raised only after the core has actually received sector data for a while without producing a picture — a mount that fails outright delivers nothing, so that timer never starts. If you get no message at all, the core never got the file; if you get UNSUPPORTED IMAGE, it read the file and could not play it. Those are different problems.

Launched from an MGL: blank screen, nothing responds

A shortcut that stalls has a 20-second backstop: the OSD always comes back, so you can load the file by hand. A load that fails — a wrong path, or a share that was not ready yet — returns to the idle screen and the file picker.

Still seeing a flat grey or green field?

This was reported and could not be reproduced here. If an MGL launch leaves you looking at a blank coloured screen, please report it — with the .mgl file itself, and whether loading the same file by hand works.

If a shortcut still does not load the movie, check the path in the .mgl: it is relative to /media/fat/games/DVD/ unless it starts with /. Raising delay to 5 helps when the file is on a network share that takes a moment to wake. See Launching from an MGL shortcut.

UNSUPPORTED IMAGE

Either the image is not ISO9660 — a UDF-only image will not load — or the file is not a playable stream at all. Check you ripped a whole-disc DVD-Video image rather than a transcode. See Compatibility.

Note this message is only raised after about 20 seconds of actual streaming, so it is not what you will see from slow media.

For a .wav it means something more specific, and appears immediately: the file is not 16-bit stereo PCM at 44.1 or 48 kHz. Mono, 24-bit, floating-point and 96 kHz files are refused rather than played as noise, and compressed audio (MP3, FLAC, AAC) is not supported at all. Convert with, for example, ffmpeg -i in.flac -ac 2 -ar 44100 -c:a pcm_s16le out.wav.

Cannot play this CUE sheet

The player read a .cue sheet and could not turn it into something to play. The second line says why:

  • missing FILE "…" — a file the sheet names is not next to it. Keep the .cue in the same folder as its .bin/.wav files, and check the sheet names the files you actually have (a sheet written for Disc.bin does not find Disc (Track 2).bin). Letter case and Windows drive-letter paths are already allowed for.
  • FILE type MP3 is not supported (or FLAC, AIFF) — only raw .bin and CD-format .wav files can be played. Convert the tracks to 16-bit stereo 44.1 kHz .wav, for example ffmpeg -i 01.flac -ac 2 -ar 44100 -c:a pcm_s16le 01.wav, and point the sheet at them.
  • WAVE must be 16-bit stereo 44.1 kHz PCM — the same, for a .wav in the wrong format.
  • no AUDIO track and no Video CD track to play — a data-only CD, such as a PC or game disc. There is nothing on it this player can show.
  • INDEX is past the end of "…" — the sheet describes more than the file holds: the .bin is truncated, or the sheet belongs to a different rip.
  • line N: … — the sheet itself is malformed at that line.

When the core was started from an MGL shortcut the reason is not shown on screen (a pop-up at that moment would stall the launch), but it is always written to /tmp/dvd_cue.log.

CSS ENCRYPTED

The core is seeing scrambled sectors, so nothing available is decrypting this disc or image. Audio is muted deliberately so you get silence rather than static; video keeps playing so you can still identify the disc.

Fix: install MiSTer_DVDcss and libdvdcss, or use a decrypted rip. See What you need.

On a physical disc with libdvdcss already installed, it means a title key could not be recovered for part of the disc. That can only happen when the drive has no region set, because the keys then have to be cracked from the disc data. The warning appears as soon as playback reaches the affected part, often after a chapter skip. The core already works around the cases seen so far. If you still see it, set the drive region: the drive then supplies the keys itself. Once the warning appears it stays until the disc is reloaded.

If the picture is perfect and only the sound is gone

Then the message is wrong. A scrambled disc looks obviously broken — blocky green rubbish over most of the picture — so a clean picture with silent audio means the core mis-read a handful of bytes and muted for no reason.

Releases up to v0.4.0 could do this: the warning latched after only four suspicious bytes anywhere in a whole session, which a perfectly good disc can produce. Later builds require sustained evidence instead, so an isolated glitch no longer trips it.

The custom Main in v0.8.0 could also do this on some physical discs, from the first menu onwards. Its read-ahead passed the first few sectors of a menu to the core without decrypting them. Later releases fix this.

If you see it on v0.5.0 or later in any other case, please send a report — it means something is still wrong.

The core loads but a physical disc does nothing

Check, in order:

  1. MiSTer_DVDcss is at /media/fat/MiSTer_DVDcss — not overwriting /media/fat/MiSTer
  2. MiSTer.ini has a [DVD] section with main=MiSTer_DVDcss, at the end of the file
  3. The core was reloaded after adding that — the Main is chosen at core load
  4. The drive is a USB optical drive that enumerates on the MiSTer

See Physical discs.

set_dvd_region refuses to change the region

Read what the drive said — the script prints it. no disc in the drive and the disc in the drive is from a different region both mean the same thing: many drives take their new region from the disc in the tray, and will only switch to a region the loaded disc allows. Put in a disc that allows the region you want and run it again. the drive will not accept another region change means its counter is spent, and nothing can be done.

See Set the drive region.

No sound

Everything plays, but much quieter than other cores

DVD soundtracks are mastered well below full scale — dialogue typically sits 20 dB or more under the peaks, so that explosions have somewhere to go. Retro console cores emit chip audio close to full scale more or less continuously, so the DVD core really is quieter at the same TV volume, and that is faithful to the disc rather than a fault.

Use MiSTer's own Core Volume control, in the OSD's system menu (the one you reach with the menu button, not the core's own OSD). Press right past maximum and it starts adding boost, shown as a + and then ++ after the bar. Each step is roughly +6 dB, and it is a compressor rather than a plain gain — quiet passages come up while peaks stay just under full scale, so it does not clip. The setting is remembered per core.

Needs a recent MiSTer Main

Boost needs MiSTer Main 20260603 or newer. Without it the boost steps do not appear in the OSD.

Boost applies to decoded audio only. In Audio Out = Passthru the core sends an untouched bitstream and your receiver's volume owns the level.

Silent on every track

  • Audio Out is on Passthru and your display cannot decode bitstreams. Dolby Digital and DTS leave as a bitstream in that mode, which an ordinary television cannot decode. Switch to Decode PCM. (LPCM and MP2 are sent as ordinary PCM in both modes, so a disc carrying only those stays audible either way.)
  • Audio is Off on the main OSD page.

Silent on one track only

Press B7 to see which audio track is playing, and again while the popup is up to change it. The disc's default may be:

  • DTS showing AUDIO UNSUPPORTED — the DTS decoder could not load its tables at start-up, so DTS is skipped (it should never happen; please report it). Use Passthru to a receiver, or pick the disc's AC-3 track.
  • LPCM showing AUDIO UNSUPPORTED — the track's header declares a sample rate or word length that DVD-Video does not allow (44.1 or 32 kHz, or an undefined word length), so it is muted rather than played as noise. Every legal LPCM track plays, in both Audio Out modes.

AUDIO UNSUPPORTED on screen means exactly this.

If none of those fit — a track is silent with no message, or cycling lands on the wrong language — the fault is likely in how the disc maps tracks to soundtracks, which lives in its navigation tables. A repro bundle captures those, so that report can be reproduced without the disc.

Sound is out of sync

Fixed in v0.5.0 — and the old advice no longer applies

Changing Video Output mid-title used to leave the audio off the picture's timeline until you skipped a chapter. Earlier versions of this page told you to do exactly that. It is fixed: the player now keeps one clock for everything it presents, so a mode change no longer costs lip sync and a chapter skip is not a workaround for anything.

Picture, sound, subtitles, menu highlights, captions and bitstream passthrough are all presented against a single clock, so lip sync should hold from the start of a title and stay there — including across chapter skips, seeks, menus and a mid-title Video Output change.

If it does not, that is a bug rather than something to work around. Try A/V Offset on the debug page to see whether a fixed correction lines it up, then report it with the disc and roughly how far into the title it started — and say whether a chapter skip changes anything, because that distinguishes two quite different faults.

Sound runs ahead of the picture after a pause

Affects decoded audio (Audio Out = Decode PCM) from Dolby Digital, DTS and MPEG audio tracks. After pausing for more than a second or so, sound came back slightly ahead of the picture and stayed that way until a chapter skip or seek. The longer the pause, the bigger the gap: about half a second after a ten-second pause, and up to a few seconds after a long one. A very long pause could also leave a few seconds of silence after resuming.

The audio decoder has a safety check that restarts it if it seems stuck. While paused, the decoder is deliberately waiting, and the check took that for a fault. Each restart threw away a short piece of the soundtrack. The check now stands down while playback is paused, so audio resumes exactly where it stopped. On a build without the fix, a chapter skip or seek after resuming puts sync right.

Speech is cut off on a game disc's question or selection screen

Fixed in v0.5.0

Affects DVD game discs with spoken screens — quiz and board games especially.

A screen that reads a question or a list of choices aloud stopped part-way through. With the on-screen display up you could also see the time counter suddenly race ahead and then stop, instead of ticking along normally.

The core throttles how fast it reads from the disc so that sound and picture stay together. It was mistaking a deliberate pause — audio waiting for its moment to play — for a jammed decoder, and switching the throttle off. The disc was then read as fast as it could be, the sound buffer overflowed, and whatever did not fit was lost. The racing counter was the same thing showing on screen.

The first word of a clip is missing after a button press or chapter skip

Fixed in v0.7.0

Most noticeable on DVD game discs, where every clip starts with speech. For example, Scooby-Doo 2's "good job" was heard as "job".

After you pressed a button that jumped to a new clip, or skipped back a chapter, the first second or so of the new clip's sound could be missing. The picture was fine.

A frame left over from before the jump was still being shown, and it still carried the old clip's timestamp. The core read the new clip's first frame as a jump backwards in time and threw away sound it had already loaded for the new clip. Leftover frames now lose their timestamp at a jump.

The same fix also stops the last second of a voice clip being cut when the disc moves on by itself.

A second of sound is missing where one clip or episode runs into the next

Most noticeable on laserdisc-style game discs such as Thayer's Quest or Mad Dog McCree, where the disc plays short clips back to back. It also shows at the join between episodes on a "play all" disc, and in some menus.

At each join the first second or so of the new clip's sound was missing while its picture played. After some joins the sound instead came in early and stayed about a second ahead of the picture until the next clip.

Many discs start each clip's timestamps again from zero. The core used to clear its sound buffer when the picture reached that point, and by then the buffer already held the start of the next clip. The sound now switches to the new clip's timing at the join itself, so nothing is thrown away. The old clip's last moment plays out, and the new clip starts with its picture. Seamless joins, such as the branch points in The Matrix, play straight through as before.

You changed the audio track while the menu was open. It comes back when you leave the menu. Known limitation.

The receiver names the format but plays static

Toggle SPDIF Byte Order (Normal / Swap). The receiver is reading the stream header correctly but the payload byte order is wrong for it. This is the classic passthrough failure and is a runtime toggle for that reason.

No audio over HDMI in Passthru, but optical works

HDMI bitstream needs MiSTer_DVDcss. On the stock Main the core deliberately will not emit a bitstream over HDMI — see What you need.

If the custom Main is installed and HDMI is still silent, the core is probably not engaging because your receiver's EDID does not advertise AC-3/DTS. Receivers reached over ARC frequently misreport this. Force it in MiSTer.ini:

[DVD]
main=MiSTer_DVDcss
dvd_hdmi_bitstream=2      ; 0=auto (default), 1=off, 2=force

Read /tmp/dvd_hdmi_audio.log to see what it decided and why — it records the EDID result and each stage of the handoff.

Another core has no HDMI audio after I used the DVD core

Update MiSTer_DVDcss to the version that shipped with your .rbf, and power-cycle the MiSTer once to clear the state you are seeing now.

To send a bitstream, the custom Main switches the HDMI transmitter out of PCM mode. Older versions did that as soon as you selected Audio Out = Passthru, even with nothing playing, and never switched it back — so the next core, which sends ordinary PCM, was played into a link still expecting compressed audio, and you got silence. Nothing else resets that setting: it survives loading another core and it survives a reboot from the menu. Only removing power clears it.

Current versions switch the transmitter only while a Dolby Digital or DTS track is actually playing, and switch it back when you load another core or reboot.

Update the core and MiSTer_DVDcss together

This fix is in both halves. A current Main with an older core still falls back to the older behaviour, because an older core cannot tell it which format is playing.

Picture problems

16:9 content looks tall and thin on a CRT

Set Analog Aspect to Letterbox (or Crop). Anamorphic content is stored squeezed into a 4:3 raster and needs unsqueezing. See Analog Aspect.

The same applies to a 31 kHz display (a VGA CRT, or 480p component on a 4:3 set) on Video Output = Progressive. There, Auto does not correct the picture, so choose Letterbox or Crop explicitly — see On Progressive.

A disc menu is cropped even though Analog Aspect is set to Letterbox

This is intended. Most widescreen menus allow only pan-and-scan on a 4:3 TV, because their buttons are all inside the centre of the picture. The core crops them the way a set-top player does. The opposite also happens: a menu that allows only letterbox is letterboxed even when Analog Aspect is set to Crop. Playback returns to your setting when the movie starts. See Widescreen disc menus.

Motion looks juddery or wobbly on a CRT

Make sure Video Output is Interlaced (or Auto with the analog ini bits set) — the CRT then gets the disc's authored fields. See Video Output.

The picture shakes or tears about once a second on a CRT or scaler

Seen on RGB SCART and YPbPr connections (composite sync / sync-on-Y), including at the idle logo, often with a RetroTINK reporting the vertical sync length or line count toggling. The core should report a steady 720x480i @ 59.94 Hz; if you see 1441x478i or 59.8 <-> 60.1 Hz instead, or it still happens, turn on Debug Overlay (O[2]): a third row of small blocks appears in the top-left while Interlaced — green means an internal raster event fired. Please report which blocks are green, your connection type and the MiSTer.ini video lines.

The picture goes aliased / screen-door after a chapter skip on a CRT

The two interlaced fields can land the wrong way round after an interruption. A picture that is starting (a disc load, a jump between a menu and the film, a Video Output switch) is placed on the correct fields before it is shown. An interruption mid-play is corrected by the core within about half a second, including while a picture is held (a disc menu, an authored copyright or warning card, a paused frame), so you may occasionally catch it settling. Many televisions never show it at all; it depends on the set.

CRT owners: please report anything that looks wrong

Televisions and scalers differ, and a set's sync separator is what decides whether this ever shows. If it happens on yours — or anything else on the analog output looks wrong — please report it with your display and the analog lines from your MiSTer.ini. See Field alignment.

Fixed in v0.5.0 — and a second, separate cause

Reports of a sawtooth or ragged look on a CRT kept coming in after v0.4.0, and they turned out not to be this at all: the composite sync itself was missing its equalizing pulses, so some televisions could not tell the two fields apart reliably. There is now an Analog CSync setting for it on the debug page — see Analog CSync. Fixing the sync also uncovered a field-order error it had been masking, which is corrected in the same version and needs no setting.

Sawtooth or ragged vertical edges on a CRT, and adjusting the picture does not help

If vertical edges look stepped or ragged, the picture seems to have half the detail it should, or a scaler tells you the fields are out of order, the sync is the first thing to try — not the picture settings.

Debug page → Analog CSync. SMPTE is the default and is what a broadcast signal carries. If your set prefers 2H, that is worth telling us — it decides whether the setting stays at all.

It does nothing if your MiSTer.ini has vga_scaler=1, and it does not affect HDMI.

Please report it either way, with your display and the analog lines from your MiSTer.ini.

The picture blocks up briefly right after a chapter skip or seek

The picture freezes on the last frame, then cuts to the new position with about one misaligned frame in between. That is expected on every disc and every transport jump: chapter skip, Fast Fwd / Rewind and D-Pad Seek. Entering or leaving a disc menu is different: the picture cuts to black for a moment and the menu (or the title) starts clean, the way a set-top player does.

Report it if you see the old scene moving through the new one, if the blocking lasts appreciably longer than a frame, or if the picture does not recover on its own.

Changing Video Output mid-title goes through the same landing sequence — see Switching mid-title.

Playback pauses or skips for a moment on a physical disc

The player reads a disc up to about 25 seconds ahead into memory. A drive's brief stalls therefore don't reach the picture: the change between the layers of a dual-layer disc, the drive spinning back up, or a scratched sector being retried. The same applies to VCD/SVCD and audio CDs in the drive, and to an encrypted .iso.

If a hitch still happens, look in /tmp/dvdcss.log over SSH, and include it in a bug report:

  • slow read lines mean the drive itself stalled at that point on the disc.
  • readahead: ring ran dry lines mean the stall outlasted what was buffered, and say how long playback waited.
  • A hitch with neither kind of line is not a problem reading the disc.

A decrypted .iso played from a network share is not buffered this way yet, so a network hiccup can still interrupt it.

A thin partial line across the top or bottom of the picture

A line right at the top or bottom edge that only reaches part of the way across — picture for part of the line, black for the rest.

This is on the disc, not the player. It is a property of the transfer: one video field's first active line begins part-way across, or the last one ends part-way across. Play the same disc in VLC on a computer and you will see the identical line. Televisions normally hide it, because a CRT and most panels overscan the edges of the picture by a few percent — which is also why it was never worth removing when the disc was made.

It shows up here for two ordinary reasons:

  • Over HDMI, if your display is set to 1:1 / "Just Scan" / "Full Pixel", there is no overscan at all, so you see every line the disc carries.
  • In Analog Aspect = Letterbox, the picture's bottom edge moves up the screen and out of a CRT's overscan region. A set-top player letterboxing the same disc puts that line in the same place.

Nothing needs changing in the core, and nothing is wrong with your rip. If it bothers you, use your display's own zoom or overscan control. Only a minority of discs carry it.

A film disc keeps changing resolution, or judders

Set Film 24p Out = On. The disc is probably hard-telecined, meaning the pulldown was baked in at authoring time and carries no flags for Auto to detect. See Film (24p).

Also confirm Frame Drop is On — advancing past a frame is the only way the player can recover time once it has fallen behind, so with it off the picture just runs later and later.

Video skips frames

This should not happen on either Video Output setting: every disc measured keeps up, including its busiest scenes, on Progressive and on Interlaced. If a disc does skip:

  • Check Film 24p Out. With it On, an NTSC video disc (29.97 frames a second) skips by design: that raster runs at 23.976 Hz and cannot show 29.97 frames a second. Set it to Auto or Off. On a PAL disc Film 24p Out = On is fine.
  • Keep Frame Drop On. Advancing past a frame is how the player catches up.
  • If it still skips, report it with the disc's name and the scene. A disc that is still too busy is exactly the case worth hearing about.

Black & white picture over composite or S-video

MiSTer.ini is missing vga_mode=svideo (or vga_mode=cvbs for composite). Without it the framework's Y/C encoder is off, the pins carry raw RGB, and the luma line shows a stable colorless picture. The chroma standard (PAL/NTSC) is picked automatically once the encoder is on. See Analog and CRT output.

If vga_mode is set and other cores show color on the same cable but the DVD core does not — or an NTSC disc shows color while a PAL disc is B&W — that is worth reporting, along with the OSD's reported resolution line.

Dark scenes show bands or contours on a CRT

Smooth gradients, such as a night sky or a fade to black, break into steps on the analog output but look smooth over HDMI. The standard I/O board's video DAC has only 64 levels per channel. Set Analog Dither = On. See Analog Dither.

If the bands show over HDMI too, they are in the disc itself, and this setting will not change them.

Nothing on the analog output at all

Check MiSTer.ini has vga_scaler=0 and a sync mode matching your cable (composite_sync=1, ypbpr=1 or vga_sog=1). The analog raster engages from the ini, not from the OSD. See Analog and CRT output.

Captions and subtitles

No captions on my TV

Work through it in this order — the middle step is the one that resolves the ambiguity:

  1. Does the disc have captions? About 6 discs in 10 do, and no PAL disc does.
  2. Turn on CC Test Line (Debug page). A band of dashes that changes with dialogue means the core side is entirely working and the problem is TV-side. Nothing at all means the analog raster is not engaged, or this disc has no captions.
  3. Your TV must be set to C1 — not the disc's subtitle menu. C2, T1 and T2 will show nothing on practically every disc.
  4. Captions are analog only, and the connection matters: composite and S-video always carry them, component does on many sets, and consumer sets generally do not slice them from RGB.

See Closed captions.

Subtitles do not appear

Subtitles are separate from captions and are drawn by the core, so they work on HDMI. Press B8 to see the current setting, and again while the popup is up to change it; SUB OFF means they are disabled. Some discs author menu subpictures with zero contrast, which is intentional on their part.

A subtitle appears even though subtitles are off

That is a forced subtitle. A disc can mark individual lines to be shown whatever the subtitle setting, usually to translate a few lines of foreign-language dialogue, and a set-top player shows them too. They come from the subtitle track the disc chose, or from its first track if it chose none. Turn subtitles on with B8 to see the full track instead.

A menu button highlight or a subtitle graphic is drawn wrongly

Fixed in v0.7.0

Most visible on Scooby-Doo 2's museum, where the "flashlight" showed dark circles and a dark square instead of lighting up the exhibit.

A disc tells the player a colour and a transparency for each of the four shades a subtitle or menu graphic is drawn in. The core ignored two of those instructions:

  • It always treated the first shade as see-through. A few discs draw visible parts of their subtitle or menu graphics in that shade, and some darken the whole screen with it, as the museum does.
  • When a menu button was selected, a shade the button's highlight marked as fully see-through kept the colour it had before being selected. The museum uses exactly that to cut a lit circle out of its darkened screen.

Both now follow the disc. One side effect: a disc that deliberately tints the whole screen while its subtitles are up now shows that tint, as a set-top player does.

A game disc's menu has no visible highlight, but the buttons work

Fixed in v0.7.0

Seen on Harry Potter Interactive's Player Mode screen (Single Player / Multi-Player).

The selection moved and Select picked the right option, but nothing on screen showed which button was selected.

The highlight graphic is part of the menu's overlay, which the disc sends again in every section of the menu. This disc restarts its timestamps in each section. The core took the new section's overlay for a repeat of the previous one, an empty overlay, and threw it away, so the highlight had nothing to draw. It now always accepts the first overlay of a new section.

Controls

My keyboard does nothing

Check the key list — the keys are fixed, not derived from your gamepad mapping. Two things reasonably often explain it:

  • A key you mapped in MiSTer's Define buttons takes over, and is doing whatever you mapped it to instead. That is how you rebind, but it can surprise you if you forgot.
  • The MiSTer OSD is open. No key reaches the player while it is up.

My IR remote does nothing at all

First find out whether MiSTer can see the receiver — that is almost always where this stops. Over SSH:

cat /proc/bus/input/devices

If there is no entry for your receiver, or its entry has no Handlers=... kbd, then Linux never turned it into a keyboard and nothing the player does can reach it.

The usual reason is that it is a Media Center (eHome) receiver. Those need a kernel driver MiSTer's Linux does not include, on any current kernel — so the dongle enumerates as a USB device and then produces nothing. It is a MiSTer Linux matter rather than a limit of this player, and update_all does not change it. Your options are to build the driver yourself or to use a receiver that presents itself as a plain USB keyboard, such as a Flirc, which will learn the same handset.

If the receiver does appear with a kbd handler but the buttons do the wrong thing:

  • Check the media-key table. Not every button on a remote has a matching player function, and a few are deliberately left alone — volume and mute belong to MiSTer, not to the core.
  • A key you mapped in Define buttons wins over the built-in mapping. That is how you rebind, but it can surprise you if you forgot.
  • You are on stock Main. The media keys come from MiSTer_DVDcss; without it only the arrows, Enter and volume get through. Check main=MiSTer_DVDcss is under your [DVD] section in MiSTer.ini.

The player also writes what it found to /tmp/dvd_report.log, including whether the kernel has any IR support at all — that line is worth quoting in a bug report.

My TV remote does nothing over HDMI-CEC

CEC has to be switched on (hdmi_cec=1 under [MiSTer] in MiSTer.ini), and it does not work on every board. Before changing anything else, get the log — MiSTer discards its own output unless you ask for it. Add debug=2 under [MiSTer], reboot, and read it:

grep -i cec /tmp/debug.txt

If that says CEC: no clock detected followed by CEC: init failed., your board's CEC hardware is not usable and no MiSTer.ini setting will change it — including hdmi_cec_clock, which only chooses between clock rates once CEC is already working. Set hdmi_cec=0 and use an infrared receiver that presents itself as a USB keyboard instead — a Flirc is the safe choice. That path does not involve CEC at all and gives you the same control. Note that a Media Center (eHome) USB dongle is not one of these: see my IR remote does nothing.

The full table of log lines and what each one means is on the controls page.

My remote's Menu button opens the MiSTer menu instead of the disc menu

That is MiSTer claiming it, and it cannot be reassigned. Use the blue colour key for the disc's menu, red for its title menu. The Menu button is still useful — it is a toggle, so it also closes the OSD again.

A menu screen says something, finishes, then says it again

Fixed in v0.5.0

On menu screens that hold on a still picture with a voice-over — character-selection screens on DVD games are the usual case — the audio played through, then played a second time before the screen settled.

The core used to re-read that part of the disc once, to make sure the still picture came up sharp rather than half-drawn, and that re-read replayed the sound along with the picture. It no longer runs, so those screens settle once — and a little faster.

Removing it did expose a separate problem on one kind of screen, fixed separately: see The first picture of a menu slideshow is blocky below.

A menu's animation plays once, then stops on its last frame

That is the disc's own instruction. A menu screen can be authored to play its animation and then hold the last frame until you choose something, and a set-top player shows it the same way. The buttons stay live: move between them and select one as usual.

Earlier builds replayed the animation on a loop on some of these discs instead of holding it. If a menu now holds where it used to loop, that is the change, and nothing is wrong. If a menu holds and no button responds, press B1 (Play/Pause) or B4 (Select), which moves the disc on (see still pictures). If that does nothing either, report it with the disc's name and the screen.

The first picture of a menu slideshow is blocky

Some discs present a set of stills you step through with the arrow keys — cast and crew biographies are the usual case. The first picture could come up coarse and blocky, with visible square edges, while every picture after it was sharp. It stayed blocky until you moved on.

This happened when the screen was reached through a short animated transition. The core was cutting that animation off a fraction of a second early, and the picture that followed had to be decoded from an incomplete starting point. It now lets the animation finish before moving on, so the first picture is decoded from a clean start like all the others.

If you still see it, the disc's name and the screen you reached it from are the useful details to report.

A menu picture comes up blocky, harsh or over-coloured and stays that way

A menu or selection screen that is one held picture could come up wrong and stay wrong for as long as you sat on it. It went one of two ways depending on the disc: coarse and blocky, with the squares of the compression showing through, or harsh — speckled texture, blown-out highlights, coloured fringing around the lettering. Pressing a direction sometimes redrew it correctly, and on a disc whose menu has a soundtrack it could fix itself a minute later, when that soundtrack looped round.

A held picture carries its decoding settings once, at the very start. If the core was still working through the previous screen when those settings arrived, it could read straight past them and decode the picture using the settings from wherever it had just been — too coarse on one disc, too contrasty on another. The core now separates the two, so a new screen's settings are always read.

If you still see it, the disc's name and the screen you reached it from are the useful details to report.

LINK FAIL nn means a menu jump failed and the core recovered by re-entering the last working menu. Occasional occurrences are harmless.

If a disc is consistently unnavigable, it is worth reporting — especially a film or TV disc, since interactive games are known-incomplete. A menu problem can be reproduced from the disc's navigation tables alone, so a repro bundle makes that report actionable without the disc.

Workaround: set Disc Menus = Off to skip navigation and auto-play the main feature.

A game disc repeats the same question

You pressed Menu to skip the intro, and that disc puts its randomisation setup in the boot sequence. Let the intro play. A real player behaves the same way.

Title does nothing

The disc has no title menu. About one disc in twenty is authored without one, and a set-top player ignores the key on those discs too. Press Menu for the disc's main menu.

A scratched disc has no menus or chapters

A DVD keeps its menus, chapters and track lists in small navigation files (.IFO), with a backup copy of each one (.BUP) written elsewhere on the disc. When the main copy can't be read, the core switches to the backup by itself, so a scratch over the navigation data usually goes unnoticed. This works with a disc in a drive and with an .iso, including one ripped from a damaged disc that left gaps where the drive failed.

When both copies of a file are damaged, that part of the disc plays as it would with no navigation data: the title plays straight through, with no chapters and no menus.

With a physical disc or an encrypted .iso, /tmp/dvdcss.log records each switch, with a line like ifo: VTS_03_0.IFO sector 2 unreadable -- served from VTS_03_0.BUP. A ... unreadable in BOTH .IFO and .BUP line means neither copy could be read. Clean the disc, try another drive, or include the log in a bug report.

The wrong title plays with Disc Menus off

The auto-selection picks the largest title set, which is not always right. Title VTS Tens and Title VTS Units on the Debug page force a specific one. The core shows TITLE VTS nn to say what it picked.

The elapsed time is wrong after seeking

On a DVD, Fast Fwd, Rewind and the D-pad all seek to an exact time, looked up in the disc's own time map, so the time the seek bar showed is the time you land on, give or take about half a second.

A small number of discs author a time map that disagrees with their own clock by a few seconds, and a few (mostly games and some anime) have none at all. On those a seek can land a few seconds from the time the seek bar showed. That is the disc's data, not a fault.

A seamless-branch disc — a special edition that stores two cuts of the film woven together in the same sectors — used to be a separate exception: a seek could land in the wrong cut. That is fixed, on both cuts. If you still see the clock disagree with the picture on one of these discs, it is worth reporting.

On a .mpg, .VOB or VCD/SVCD the clock is an estimate derived from how fast the file plays, not a timecode read from the disc, so on a very variable-bitrate file it can drift by a few seconds through the title. That is expected, not a fault.

Support bundles

The chord does nothing

Hold Audio + Subtitle together for a full two seconds. Both buttons must be down at once, and the timer only starts when the second one goes down. It also needs MiSTer_DVDcss — on the stock Main nothing is listening, and there is no message.

Nothing to bundle with a disc playing

The message lists what the player could see. mounted: (not captured) means it did not record the mount, which should not happen — that one is worth reporting. css active: 0 with drive: (none) while a physical disc is playing points the same way.

Support bundle FAILED

Read /tmp/dvd_report_run.log. Most often python3 is missing or too old — the collector needs 3.7 or newer.

After an update

All my settings reset

Expected when a release changes the OSD option layout — see Settings. It happens once per layout change, by design, rather than silently misreading an old file.

A feature in the documentation is not in my build

This manual is published with each release and documents that release — the banner at the top of every page names which one. Check it against the version line the OSD shows. If they differ you are running an older core, or a test build handed out before a release; install the latest release.