ISO DVD menus on a Roku TV

[BarryTice]

Greetings.

Executive summary/TLDR:
Using Jellyfin on a Raspberry Pi to serve ripped ISOs to a Roku TV, and the Roku remote can't interact with the DVD menus.

Details:
About a decade ago I got tired of looking at a wall of DVDs and ripped them all to ISO images. At the time I had a Raspberry Pi running OpenELEC connected to an external hard drive, with the Pi providing an HDMI output to my TV. I could use my laptop to browse to the menu and controls that OpenELEC/Kodi provided, and select from the DVD menu's options on my laptop screen. All of this got disconnected about five moves ago and I'm just now trying to get all my stuff easily available to me again.

These days my ISOs are on a NAS and I have a ROKU TV instead. I read that Jellyfin will serve and transcode DVD ISO files "live", and with Roku having a Jellyfin client thought that might be the way to go. So last night I gave my Pi a new Raspbian with a fresh Jellyfin server on it and pointed it to the ISOs on my NAS. Then I installed the Jellyfin client on my Roku.

The navigation interface is just what I expected it to be, and while it takes a few seconds to actually open a DVD this way, I'm happy with that.

My problem is, it opens the DVD to the normal DVD menu, the same menu you would get if you put a physical disc in a DVD player (as expected), but the Roku remote doesn't seem to have any means to access or interact with the DVD menu. The OK button seems to only pause/play the loop of the DVD menu. The directional buttons around it don't seem to do anything. The rewind/forward buttons, and the play/pause buttons act as you would expect them to, not interacting with the DVD menu options.

The reason I want my things as ISO is to maintain access to all the other things on the DVD, like subtitle languages, commentary tracks, and DVD extras (outtakes, deleted scenes, interviews, etc.).

Is there a way to interact with the DVD menus using the Roku remote, or am I going to have to give up on Jellyfin and go back to something like LibreELEC and using my laptop as the remote? (I like this less as it requires the Raspberry Pi to have that HDMI connection to the Roku TV rather than streaming wirelessly.)

Or, does someone have a better solution?

Thanks!

[crobibero]

There is no support for navigating a DVD menu on any client. Upcoming 10.9 may provide a better experience for playing the ISO

[BarryTice]

Thank you for the information, crobibero. It might not be what I wanted it to be, but I'd rather know the truth.

When you say 10.9 (currently expected to be finalized and delivered in late April of 2024) "may" provide a better experience for playing the ISO, is that speculation based on anything, or just the knowledge that "a bunch of things are getting better and there's a chance that's one of them"?

Also, from your understanding is it likely that this would require updates to both the server and the client? If I want to try one of the weekly builds as a beta, would I need both or just the client?

[mightyenigma]

Jellyfin can include special features like interviews, shorts, featurettes, etc. just like Plex can, at least, it included all the same stuff I had set up for Plex automatically when it scanned the folder.
In Plex you add special suffixes (not extensions) to the filenames like -featurette, -short, etc.

I don't know if this is what made Jellyfin able to find them, but it did one way or the other.
When I open the movie in Jellyfin, and then scroll down below the IMDB info, the special features are all there.

To get the special features from the DVD, I ripped my (legally owned) DVD with MakeMKV (free until end of June 2024) and it gets every video on the disk that is longer than the minimum length you set in the MakeMKV preferences, including the special features.

This doesn't give you menu interaction, but it does give you the special features you wanted to get to via the menus.