A puzzle: DVD Player handling of .JPG CDs (1 Viewer)

[Dick Knisely]

I've got a week-old Denon 1920 DVD player and I've been experimenting with it. But despite several attempts at figuring out just what's going on it has my baffled when it comes to how it handles a CD with images (JPG files). And yes, I did RTFM, for all the good that did. (Side comment: terrific player, mediocre-to-terrible manual).

Displaying the images does work, sorta, but what remains a mystery is the order in which they are shown. For example, to experiment with I loaded a CD written with files at the root, in three subdirectories and one of those had a subdirectory under it, i.e.:

root
----dir1
----dir2
------subdir2-1
----dir3

It seemed that no matter where I started or what I did I got a random order--well, an order with no discernible ordering anyway. Example: starting at the first image in dir1 the first few all came from there but then it started interspersing those with images from the root and dir1. I also tried a case where only dir1/2 were present with similar results.

I keep thinking I must have missed something somewhere but I don't know where or what. All I wanted was to select a directory and have it work through the images in some order I could control but that's not what happened. I dug around in all the setup options and found nothing relevant and the manual was very unenlightening!

Anyone with that player figured this out? Anyone else have any general ideas or thoughts on what it might be doing.

 

[ChristopherDAC]

Every model is different. Is yours [by chance] sorting the filenames, irrespective of directory, in alphanumerical order?

 

[Dick Knisely]

Hmmmm... maybe but if so, the sort algorithm is doing something funny at least as I remember what I did anyway. Easy to repeat since I've got the example CD's right by the player.

If I remember correctly, all files in the root and in at least one subdir had leading 2 digit numbers in the long file names. If that's what this thing does then, yes it would look like it was skipping around through the directory tree. If so, the otherwise useful capability is pretty limited in usefulness -- have to put everything at the root to avoid the mixup since the player effectively ignores the directory structure.

Have to try another round of experiments I guess.

Why do I feel a headache coming on? --

 

[Dick Knisely]

Update. Headache mostly gone now

Well, it seems the critter does indeed read everything on the CD and sort as if it were all at the root. It's a typical ASCII sort but only on filenames not fully qualified names (no directory tree references) and reads only the first 25 characters of the filename. I still can't figure out how it sorts when 2+ files end up with the same 25-character name; didn't seem consistent. This appears to be the case for handling both MP3s and JPGs on CDR's.

I finally found something I really don't :frowning: like about the Denon player. Oh well, its not the most important use of the player but it means that if I want to use it for the equivalent of family pic slideshows, I'll have to construct them carefully to accomodate this set of limitations.

 

[ChristopherDAC]

Filesize maybe? Oh well, with a minimum of 36 [assuming case-insensitive] characters, elementary combinatorics suggest you have "a buttload" of possible unique filenames. Of course you'll have to rename the files before you burn them, which can be a drag, especially with the "artist-album-track" convention most people seem to use for music files, but at least you can work with it.

 

[Dick Knisely]

It's workable but a real pain.

I didn't see using the MP3 read capability much and even less after figuring this out. And you are correct, I've spent a lot of time getting the TAGS and directory/filenames set up for some 9,000+ MP3s and my convention for filename is either 'artist - album - tracknum - trackname' or if the artist is in the directory structure, then just the last 3 tags. The DVD's sort order fails completely for the first case and sometimes for the second. You'd think if they bothered to include the code to play the MP3's at all they would have set it up like MP3 players generally do which is to ignore the filenames entirely and use the TAGS... but nope. In this case, it really just means I'll hook up the 60GB Nomad player to the receiver and let that handle the file management issues.

Bigger impact is for almost-as-large collection of JPGs from digital cameras and scans of paper photos. I adopted file structure and naming conventions for these long ago and they won't work well here but fortunately I have a couple mass rename utilities I can use to create special slide-show CD's. This is a use I really had hoped would work well -- its one of the reasons I upgraded from my Toshiba player. Neither Denon nor anyone at the store really understood the question much less was capable of answering it. In the store all I could do was verify that it would, indeed, display the images. I knew something was funky with the sorting but no way could I sort it out there and, frankly, it wasn't going to keep me from buying the player. And the end result is annoying but tolerable.