PGCEdit: Trace mode

[ggtop]

Hi,

I just play with Pirates of the Carribean 4. After ripping the disc using AnyDVD I opened it with PGCEdit. There are a lot of warnings, 2 of them because of different commands in menu LUs. VMGM has 3 diffent LUs: English, German and ie (26981 0x6965 Interlingue). My virtual player settings are set to german. After starting the trace mode First Play jumps to a title and comes back to VMGM, LU3(de), PGC1, which is a menu with black background and 24 buttons. The PGC has cell still time: 254 and button 1 is selected. Auto-activation is disabled. No matter what I do it leads to end of playback -> Dead end! As this menu is obviously a fake I know how to deal with these kinds of "protection" but I wondered why the disc/rip plays fine using MPC HC for example. Is there any magic in DVD parsers that is not implemented in PGCEdit? Or is there a limitation?
If I change the preferred menu language to ie or en the trace mode behaves the same as in MPC HC and the disc plays fine. Has "ie" priority over other language settings?

ggtop

[r0lZ]

... a menu with black background and 24 buttons. The PGC has cell still time: 254 and button 1 is selected. Auto-activation is disabled.
It's a well known protection method. Usually, there is no cell still time and the playback is really short, so there is not enough time to activate a button (especially since the buttons are invisible). The playback continues therefore normally with the cell or post-commands. The fake buttons contain direct or indirect jumps to the fake protected VTSses. In that case, you can kill the PGC playback, and when PgcEdit shows the menu viewer to let you select which button to emulate, select "No button!". The references to the fake VTSses will be killed, and you can use Delete Uncalled TitleSets and Delete Uncalled PGCs to get rid of them.

But in your menu, there is a long still time, so I guess that the Force Auto-Activation option must be enabled (not to be confused with the Auto-Action flag). If it's the case, you should open the menu in the menu editor, and examine what button is forced. Then kill the menu, but select that button instead of "No Button!".

Is there any magic in DVD parsers that is not implemented in PGCEdit? Or is there a limitation?
As far as I know, no.

If I change the preferred menu language to ie or en the trace mode behaves the same as in MPC HC and the disc plays fine. Has "ie" priority over other language settings?
No. The rule is that the LU that has a code matching the preferred menu language code is selected, and if there is no LU with that language code, then the first LU is used.

[ggtop]

I think the error was on my end. It seems I messed up my virtual player settings. I started from scratch and everything is fine now.

Sorry for stealing your time :o

ggtop

[r0lZ]

No problem!
It seems I messed up my virtual player settings.
By the way, if you want to check the behaviour of a DVD with specific virtual player settings, click the "Use" button instead of "Save". The settings will be used during the current PgcEdit session, but the last saved settings will be restored the next time you start PgcEdit.
I recommend to "Save" the settings matching the settings of your real standalone player, and "Use" other settings for testing purposes.

[ggtop]

That's how I use it normally. Maybe I clicked the wrong button by accident. If I click "Save" are these settings used immediately in the current trace mode session or can this only achived by clicking "Use"? I'll check that later because I have no PGCEdit and no example on the machine I'm working with.

ggtop

[r0lZ]

"Save" saves the settings and uses them for the current session and the next ones. "Use" is implied.

Note that "Use" uses the current settings during the current PgcEdit session, not the current Trace session. Closing and re-opening the trace mode is not sufficient to restore the saved settings. You have to quit PgcEdit and relaunch it, or edit the settings manually to restore them.

[ggtop]

I changed the value for preferred menu language in the settings from "de" to "ie" for testing with "Save" instead of "Use". So that value was also used for other instances. I'll have a closer look to SPRM(0) in the future ;)

ggtop