Maestro version

[Mosaic]

What is the current version of Maestro

[Deepa DvD]

- I dont know.I did try it at a studio, long time ago and it sort of looked a bit weird coz I've been used to other programs.;)

[Arky]

Well, how can I put this..."OFFICIALLY", Apple's buyout of Spruce left licensed Maestro users in limbo, with Apple (obviously) having very little interest in paying Spruce engineers to continue to develop the program on the windows platform. I don't know what version licensed users are currently using, but I can tell you that the most erm... "popular" late version is 2915a.


Arky ;o)

[auenf]

'officially,' the latest version of DVDMaestro is pre-3.0

Enf...

[mikeathome]

Originally posted by auenf
'officially,' the latest version of DVDMaestro is pre-3.0

Enf...

... should have said better

'officially,' the last version of DVDMaestro is pre-3.0

see the small difference with great impact.

mike

[Arky]

yeah, and that "little" difference is the result of several hundred thousand dollars exchanging hands, and the reason why hundreds of Maestro users, who've each spent several thousand dollars, have been left very cheesed off indeed! :rolleyes:


Arky ;o)

[easy2Bcheesy]

We're not *that* cheesed off to be honest. The product does practically anything you can ask of it. Updates would have been nice to iron out some of the bugs that remain, but overall, unless the an enhanced DVD format takes over, Maestro will continue to do the job just fine as it is, for the foreseeable future. Spruce Technical Support was always shit any way, so it's not as if we're losing anything that substantial.

No, what really pissed us off was abandoning the Conductor series of tools and only updating the Maestro codebase. Conductor was a great way to effectively get Maestro but with massive savings. Conductor+PowerPack was £10,000 less than Maestro and did pretty much everything apart from region encoding (which with command sequences you can program yourself) and CSS (which is pointless any way).

[auenf]

CSS isnt pointless to the major studios, altho they can afford the extra price for that feature alone.

and im guessing the region restrictions via command sequences is basically the same as RCE?

Enf...

[mpucoder]

That's interesting, 10,000 pounds to set the value in one byte of every .ifo - a task that any hexeditor can do. I guess it's true that no one in an edit bay (or off in a corner pre-mastering) has a clue how this all works at the bit level.

[auenf]

uhh, isnt css discs a different sector size or something?

Enf...

[mpucoder]

I was talking about the region mask.
No, CSS does not use a different sector size. The keys are just in an area you can't access easily. It was also my understanding that this is done by the replicator, and does not appear in the DLT masters.

[auenf]

when writing the DLT or DVD-R(A) the img is 'formatted for CSS'

Enf...

[easy2Bcheesy]

Yes, you can use command sequences to simulate region encoding, just like RCE. Conductor+PowerPack has full access to the command sequences needed to read off the SPRMs.

I said CSS is pointless because the entire protection system has been cracked and circumventing it only adds a few minutes work to someone who knows what they are doing.