VLC won't play many .ISO files

[Cactus Jack]

Hello all. I'm having a playback problem with VLC. I have many movie files stored on a NAS, in various formats but mostly .ISO. VLC will not play many of the .ISO files now, although I have played the same ones before. When I open the file, the file name shows in the VLC title bar and status bar, but it never plays; the window remains black with the VLC logo. SOME of the .ISOs will play. If I mount the non-playing .ISO files as drives, then VLC will play them fine. VLC will also play other formats, including .MKV, .M4V, and .FLV from the NAS.

After opening one of these .ISO files, I cannot open any other file without first restarting VLC. When I close VLC, the UI closes, but vlc.exe is still running, I have to stop the process in Task Manager. I've enabled logging under Advanced options (leaving verbosity at -1, as I don't know what other settings do) but no log file is created. I enabled Messages in the Tools folder with Verbosisty set to 2; the log file is created, but is empty after trying to play .ISO file.

Found a few others reporting similar issue in the forums, but no solutions have worked for me. One post noted that VLC has never officially supported playback directly from an .ISO file; OK, but other than for the occassional "broken" .ISO file, I've always been able to play them, including from my NAS. Found one post from December 2010, to which a reply said it's a known issue, but the tracking ticket said "fixed."

Running Windows 7 Home Premium 64bit on i7 Quad-core laptop with 16GB memory, NVIDIA video adapter with 3GB dedicated memory.
VLC v2.0.5, just installed to see if it would fix issue first noted in earlier version
.ISO files were all ripped from DVDs with AnyDVD

Any suggestions to resolve this issue? If the only reliable solution is to mount the .ISOs as drives, I can certainly do that, but it was sure nicer to simply open the .ISO directly in VLC. (Hope I haven't been too long-winded here, but the forum rules DO say to provide as much detail as possible.)

Thanks,
Jack

[Rémi Denis-Courmont]

dvdread can only access local files. So ISO must be on mounted file systems.

This is a limitation of dvdread, not VLC. But there are no alternative open-source libraries for this purpose...

[Cactus Jack]

dvdread can only access local files. So ISO must be on mounted file systems.

This is a limitation of dvdread, not VLC. But there are no alternative open-source libraries for this purpose...

I don't see how this can be entirely true. As I said, SOME of the .ISOs I've tried recently WILL play from the network, and a large number of the failing files I HAVE played before, again, over the network.

I just noticed something else. Checking "I/O Reads" in Task Manager while VLC is trying but failing to play, the reads are incrementing regularly. So it appears to be transferring data but not processing it? Or I could be completely off-base here.

Jack