VLC (and Parole) quirks

I have a number of home-recorded video DVDs of Prom concerts, etc,
and I want to make notes of the elapsed times when various items of
music start. In the past I've done that using a DVD player/recorder,
but that is tedious for various reasons. So I thought I'd use VLC on
a box running Xubuntu.

This plays the DVDs OK (although I have to rip as iso images to a
file to avoid some 'skipping' when playing from DVD). It also shows
an elapsed time and the duration of the 'track' (title) being played.

However the snag is that although the total time is correct, the
elapsed time is often wrong.

For example, on one disc a given item of music starts at a time which
my DVD recorders/players show as 28min 36secs. But VLC shows this
same point as being at 28mins 59secs. i.e. Adrift by 23 seconds. So
if I use VLC to note the time the music 'starts' I then find that is
more than 20 sec into the actual music when I play the DVD on a
conventional DVD player/recorder!

I've done a duckduckgo search but not found any info on how to fix
this. Can someone point me at the solution?

FWIW I'm *not* talking about a lip-synch offset. The vision and sound
are in synch OK. The problem is that the 'elapsed time' displayed by
VLC is simply inaccurate by many seconds. Yet it starts off at 00:00
and if I play near the end of the item it gets to the end with the
elapsed time showing correctly.

Although I've not yet let it play the entire file to see if the drift
then accumulates, this doesn't seem to be a cumulative error as the
value I get above doesn't depend on if I drag the time-slider to some
point or another. So puzzling all around!

As a cross-check I also tried using Parole (which installed with
Xubuntu). This *does* show an elapsed time that matches the DVD
players/recorders, so give the 'correct' value. *But* Parole is a
PITA because I can't find any way to tell it to send the audio to
ALSA. So using that I have to judge on movement, not audio!

And, yes, I've wasted time trying to get pulse audio to let the
output go to 'alsa' with the 'card' being my external USB DAC. No
joy. But if anyone know how I can force Parole to send audio direct
to alsa and bypass the awful pulse audio, please let me know. Again,
a search I did failed to give me any leads on that.

Slainte,

Jim

Funnily enough, I tried yesterday to use vlc to play some of my DVDs
made using a DVD-writing DVD/VCR player/recorder, and vlc on my Ubuntu
10.04 PC doesn't even see them. GNOME-Player does, but I am interested
in finding out what I have to do to vlc to make it accept the DVD-Video
format (MPEG-2?) that the DVDs are supposed to be in. Maybe somebody can
help us both.

In article <jnlojo$u00$, Davey
wrote:


> Funnily enough, I tried yesterday to use vlc to play some of my DVDs
> made using a DVD-writing DVD/VCR player/recorder, and vlc on my
> Ubuntu 10.04 PC doesn't even see them. GNOME-Player does, but I am
> interested in finding out what I have to do to vlc to make it
> accept the DVD-Video format (MPEG-2?) that the DVDs are supposed to
> be in. Maybe somebody can help us both.

FWIW with VLC to play DVDs recorded on my home recorder I can either:

A) Use the VLC menus to open/run the DVD in the drive. Look for
something like 'open disc' or try <ctrl>D.

B) Drag and drop an iso image of it from the filer. (I use ROX
filer.) For that I'd have first made the iso using 'cat /dev/dvd >>
filename.iso'.

They load and display the root menu of the disc, then navigate as
does a video DVD player. Making the iso takes time but reduces any
tendency to skip/jitter during playing.

Maybe your VLC isn't looking in the correct place to find the dvd in
/dev/dvd (or equivalent?). I'm using Xubuntu 11.10.

I've not found any fix for the problems I reported. I've wasted some
hours using things like gconf-editor, gstreamer-properties, and hand
editing the config files, etc. All kinds of different 'solutions'
given on the web. So that to all appearances gstreamer and pulse are
being told to send output to the default alsa device. (I've also
tried explicitly specifying which device by alsa values, name, etc.)

As in the past that has zero success. Parole still sends its output
to what 'it' thinks is the requlred audio sink - the headphone socket
on the front of the box.

So for working on video timings I've just given in. I plug a small
variable attenuation and headphones into the front socket and listen
that way.

Throughout all that, VLC and Audacious happily go on sending direct
to alsa and play out though the USB DAC that I *want* to use.

Alsa 2 : Gstreamer/Pulse Nil. I got alsa working in a few mins.
Days/hours of effort fail to get pulse to do as I want. Much like my
previous experiences with pulse fouling things up.

Slainte,

Jim

Thanks for the thoughts, and sorry about your problems. For mine, vlc
sees a commercial DVD as soon as it's inserted, and Nautilus displays
its title. vlc just reports that there's nothing there. Windows7 said
that there was an empty disc there. Most puzzling.

Home recorded discs aren't
(in my experience) encrypted.[1]