Replacing titles, complexed..

[bigmo]

I've been working on making the "best episodes of __" DVD, with 4 episodes per disc. So far, I had luck with editing my original menu completely, and it's now fully functional. I replaced the old menu in the original DVD with it.

I have one last step to complete. In their current state, the menus all work, but they are linking to the old episodes, kind of defeating the whole purpose. I planned to just replace the old episodes with the new ones, but it's turned out to be harder than I thought it would...

The DVD has five titles - the first seems to be all of the episodes bunched together, around 3hrs of video. The other four are the actual episodes, which are roughly 45mins in length each. I did some experimenting with VOBBlanker's "replace" function, but that only seems to work if the title is in one VOB, unless i'm not doing it correctly. I was able to cut out the titles for the "best episodes" I wanted with DVD-Shrink, but it doesn't add multiple titles to the same VOB as the DVD was set up to. I'm also not sure how to create the massive megatitle of all four of the episodes, if it's even needed.

I'm pretty much stuck on what to do, out of ideas. I'm not sure how to replace the old titles with the new ones. Any suggestions are appreciated. :confused:

[blutach]

OK, here's what I did once. It is a bit difficult, but it works.

You need to make the replacing VTS only have 1 title. Use PgcEdit to do this. Let's start work with episode 1 (needs to be title 1 on its own). Remap the titles so the unwanted ones are the highest and remove them. A good idea is to backup the whole project first by copying into a different folder - just in case.

Now, run VobBlanker for the first time. Replace the title - but now the replacing VTS wil only have the title you are working on. VobBlanker will do its stuff and you're done with one of them. At this stage, your project has 1 ep that you want and 3 more to do.

Repeat, but this time, leave title 1 as the 2nd one to replace. etc. Long but it works.

Of course then, in PgcEdit make sure your menu buttons still work.

I'm pretty sure though that DVD Remake Pro can do this all in one click (though I haven't tried it). Dimad will chip in, I'm sure :)

EDIT: It might be easier in PgcEdit just to reconstruct the DVD. Import the menu into the correct VTSM, while leaving the titles in place. It's up to you to judge this. Or even starting from scratch with File - New DVD.

Regards

[Dimad]

Sure it can be done in DvdReMake Pro :) Import both disks, select blocks from new title, copy them (Ctrl+C), switch to disk with old title, select blocks you want to replace and paste (Ctrl+P). Make sure that there is the same amount of blocks in each title first. If destination has less blocks then source - just split some of them (scroll a bit in the preview, right click and "split here"). If there are more - select PGC with the title and delete some programs as well as chapters for the title.

[bigmo]

Thanks for the advice. I played around with trying to construct the DVD from scratch last night, and it was surprisingly easy using the original as a template. There were quite a few messed up links that had to be fixed, but other than being a little time consuming it wasn't a problem.

I managed to make it an almost exact duplicate of the original, fully functional, with the "best" episodes inserted into it. I'm having one final issue, which isn't really a problem for playback, but i'd like to learn how to fix it, if it's possible.

The original DVD (below) has one giant title which contains all four episodes, and also four separate titles for linking to each of those episodes. When playing the DVD, if I choose to play it from the beginning, this allows it to go straight from one episode to another via the mega title without going to the menu. But if I choose to play a specific episode, it will play that episode only, via the single titles, and then return to the menu in order to choose another.
http://img417.imageshack.us/img417/3374/original8eo.jpg


The new structure I created (below) only has the mega title though, and none of the single episode titles. Because of this, I can play all episodes from start to finish like the original, but I can't select a single episode and play it and have it return to the menu after it is completed, for a new episode selection. I can't import the titles along with their VOBs since that would make the disc size around 15Gb.
http://img417.imageshack.us/img417/2640/new4ia.jpg

It seems I either need to:
A. Create four 'dummy' titles, and somehow use them to link to the portions of the mega title that correspond to each of the episodes.
or
B. Add some commands which somehow determine whether the playback is for the whole movie or for an individual episode, and if it's for a single episode, cause it to return to the menu after that episode ends.

Is it possible to do either of those procedures in PGCedit?

[blutach]

Titles 5, 7, 9 and 11 needed to contain your 4 eps on their own. Your mega title (is a play-all) title and can be created after this importation in PgcEdit - Title-->New Play All Title.

Regards

[bigmo]

I planned to do that originally, but it seemed that PGCEdit could only create a play all title from a single VTS. Whenever I singled out each episode title in Shrink or TMPGEnc-DA, and later imported them into PGCedit, each episode title either ended up in a different VTS, or a 'mega title' was created out of them (which I ended up using in the above example).

What program can I use to merge the four episode VTSes that were extracted from the original movies into one single VTS, while keeping each of the four individual titles separated? (Each extracted episode is made up of one 0.98Gb VOB and one 800mb~ one) It seems that's what I need to do now, unless PGCedit can create a play all title out of multiple VTSes somehow.

[CirTap]

bigmo,
just do what most ep. DVDs do: use a free GPRM to flag "play all" mode and "single ep" mode. at the end of each title check that "magic" GPRM and then either jump back to the RootMenu or the next title. You'd need a dummy menu to do the logic and jumps.
So a DVD with 4 titles, no 'mega title', would be easier to handle. and since the "logic" and structure remains the same you can use this as a template for you "best of" series.

Have fun,
CirTap