To play a movie click on the blue play button. The movie will start playing from your last played position. If the Remote Controller option is activated the play dialog shows instead (see Remote Controller for more information). If you would like to play from the beginning of the movie once the movie starts playing you can press the “Home” use the mouse and position the slider to the beginning. If the play button shows a “HD” icon, like the image above, it will play the Blu-Ray file otherwise it will play the DVD file. The file that is played is dependent on your available files and format preference for that display. Alternately, you can play a specific format by clicking on a file link in the Movie Detail Page.

Playing episodes

There are several ways to play an episode.  Clicking the play button next to the movie image starts playing from your last episode and position. To enable this you must specify a media file in the Detail tab of the Modify Movie Page. Although you can specify any one of the episode files here, it is preferred that you set the first episode of season one.  

If you like to see a different episode, you can select the specific episode from the Movie Detail Page.  If you have previously watched the episode before, it will play from your last position.

When an episode finishes, it continues playing the next sequential episode from the beginning, ignoring any previously played position for that episode. Any gaps (i.e. video file missing) in the episodes prevents playing the next episode.   You can also immediately navigate to the next episode by clicking on the "Next" link in the Media Player Page when playing an episode. This plays the next episode from the previous watched position.

Media player page

The media player page uses the open source media player, VLC, to play movies.  Whatever video file format VLC supports should be playable on the media player page.   Note: This application was design for use with main movie backups and not for complete disc images. It does not support DVD navigation.

Player controls are depicted in the image below.  Keyboard shortcuts appear in brackets next to the control description. 

You may also double click the left mouse button in the video area to toggle full screen mode.

NOTE: The Aspect Ratio and Crop options do not appear when using Firefox or Chrome. I could not get the VLC mozilla plugin to work correctly with these options.

VLC Parameters

The VLC media player has tons of parameters that can adjust the way a movie is played.  For experience VLC users, the application provides multiple levels where you can setup your own VLC parameters separately for DVD and Blu-Ray files. It also has the capability to specify VLC parameters based on the media file extension (e.g. [m2ts]:demux=avformat). In the settings page, you can specify default VLC parameters for use by all displays. Each display can also overwrite these default parameters and provide their own parameters.  At the movie level, you can add additional VLC parameters that are combined with those at the display level.  The movie level VLC parameters have precedence over the display level parameters.