Default DVD menu language

[jelockwood]

DVD players can have a default language set, when playing a DVD 'disc' which supports multiple languages it can then automatically select the language that matches your preferred choice.

I cannot speak for every computer DVD player but it seems VLC does not respect this, nor can I find an option to configure this. The nearest I could find was a thread in these forums discussing VLC on WIndows and suggesting VLC uses the language that Windows is set to.

This would be fine, my Mac is set to English UK as is my Windows PC, and this therefore equates to 'en' as far as DVD players are concerned.

However I am trying to play a PAL DVD copy of 'Star Wars Episode IV - A New Hope' which has multiple European languages and in particular DVD menus in both English and French. When I play this using 'Apple DVD Player' it does correctly use English for the DVD menu, when I 'debug' it using myDVDEdit on the same Mac it also uses English as the default based on 'System' setting. When I play it in VLC it annoyingly uses the French DVD menu.

Note: VLC itself runs and provides its own user interface in English e.g. menus and dialogs.

I could using myDVDEdit 'edit' the .IFO files to hard code the VIDEO_TS folder and its IFO files to English but likely I will encounter other DVDs that have the same issue, obviously it would be much better if VLC did things properly.

For those curious I believe Pgc 11 on this disc makes the decision which 'branch' to follow based on system/preferred language and Pgc 12 is the English DVD menu branch and Pgc 13 is the French DVD menu branch. The DVD commands for Pgc 11 in MyDVDEdit look like the following

R0 = 1
if(R10 == R0) R6 = 9
R0 = 0
if(R4 == R0) Goto 8
R0 = $270F
if(R6 == R0) Link Pgc 12
Link Pgc 15
R0 = $270F
if(R6 == R0) Link Pgc 13
Link Pgc 54

Note: I am using VLC 3.0.18 which appears to still be the latest version and this issue has applied to numerous previous versions as well.

Just checked on Windows. VLC 3.0.18 on Windows also stubbornly plays this disc using the French DVD menu, My Movies 5 on Windows plays it using the English DVD menu as does Windows Media Player.

So only VLC gets it wrong.

My guess is that VLC is not setting a 'system' value for menu, audio and subtitle defaults/preferred and hence these are likely left as empty or zero and then the DVD disc code branches the wrong way. Or worse the built-in hard coded value in VLC is indeed French. (Perhaps the programmer of this part of VLC was themselves French.)

[jelockwood]

As per my previous message I had been having a problem with VLC playing a DVD menu in the wrong language. It turns out I was incorrectly blaming VLC based on an incorrect assumption on how VLC played DVDs with menus.

It turns out that as default is configured to skip any introductory items on a DVD and go straight to the DVD menu. I thought it might do this by reading through all the initial DVD commands - but not displaying them and instead 'skipping' them until it reached the menu. It turns out it jumps directly to the first VTS Title Root menu entry and executes that.

This means not only does it skip over trailers, adverts, anti-piracy warnings, etc. but also skips over commands which relevant to my issue - read from the computer environment the language settings and use those to set the default DVD menu language, subtitle language and audio language.

Note: whilst VLC does not have a matching option many other DVD players let you set specific default values for these language settings.

Because VLC is skipping over these initial commands the 'registers' used to store this information are not sent and then in this case with this particular Star Wars disc it happens due to the way it has been written default to values that result in the French menu being selected and not the English language. With most other discs - at least the ones I have this same behaviour happens to happily result in the English language being selected.

I have discovered that VLC does let you turn this skipping feature off and then it does start with the 'first play' section and hence does execute all the normal DVD commands including those that read and store the default language information. In this mode VLC does in my case default to English.

Having learned this is how VLC works I have however been able to edit the DVD commands in the VIDEO_TS.IFO file and I have been able to add some extra lines so that if the DVD is being played normally from the 'first play' section it works as normal, but if VLC is jumping direct to the VTS Title root menu then by reading the value of the R2 register and if it is not set to a 'normal' value for this disc it assumes that has indeed jumped direct and then rather than executing the rest of the commands it jumps to the English menu specifically.

This - for me gives me the best of both worlds.

For anyone else I can therefore say that VLC does indeed as would be desired obey the operating system language settings - but only if you have it play in normal mode and not the default jump direct to menu mode.