Extras that are in other VTS sets

[hoops10]

As I've done more and more movies, I've found more and more ways to author a dvd. I have a Disney movie now, that starts with some warnings, and then the 'Walt Disney Home Video' logo, then has previews for other Disney films, and then starts the movie. It never goes to the main menu. Of course, the warnings, logos and previews are all in different vts sets. Is it possible to make it so that when the dvd is played it goes right to the main menu and skips all the other stuff? I don't think I can strip them becuase they are in their own vts set. The main movie is in the vts_04 set. I do have a little experience with the Pre Command stuff located in the video_ts.ifo file. All I want on my final dvd is the main menus, the main movie and 1 audio stream. Any help would be greatly appreciated. Thanks.

[daxab]

I was just dealing with this same issue on another Disney DVD. In my case, VTS_02 was full of previews. Like you, I wanted to skip right to the main menu. In fact, I needed more space, so I wanted to delete the previews.

My first attempt was to look at VIDEO_TS/VMGM_MAT/First Play PGC. This jumped to VMG PGC 4. So next I looked at VIDEO_TS/VMGM_PGCI_UT/PGC-Menu_4. This jumped to Title 3. Looking back at VIDEO_TS top level, I saw that Title 3 was VTS_2, TTN_1. The main movie was Title 1. So I just changed the command to jump to Title 3 (in PGC-Menu_4) to jump to Title 1. (After backing up the IFOs of course.)

Since this was in a menu, I couldn't edit it as a command. That's just a current limitation of IfoEdit that Derrow might change one day. So I edited the hex itself. I looked for an "03" and changed it to "01". Then I clicked out of PGC-Menu_4 and back in. It looked good. I got rid of the VTS_02 vobs completely, leaving the VTS_02 IFO, which freed up a lot of space.

When I tested all this, it worked, but not perfectly. It turns out that the VTS_02 IFOs were doing some setup. Without the setup, the movie played, but with the subtitles on. Not a big deal, but something not too hard to fix.

My second attempt was to open VTS_02_0.IFO and look around. I noticed that all of the PGC's (there were 6) ended up in V/C 4/1, which was 1 second of blank video. This is a common practice. It makes it so the user can hit chapter forward to skip to the end of something. It also is very convenient for us. I did a VOB Extras on the IFO and stripped out all VOB IDs except for 4. This left a valid VOB file, but tiny, with just 1 second of blank video for all the PGCs. Now I restored VIDEO_TS.IFO from its backup copy.

This worked better. It jumped to Title 3, which plays one second of blank video, does some register set up, and then goes on to the main menu.

I don't know how your DVD is structured but it might be similar. If not, the other idea I had was to copy the commands from VTS_02_0.IFO into VIDEO_TS.IFO. This is more work but it should have worked too. It involves copying big chunks of stuff in the hex editor and adjusting the number of commands manually (since it's all in menus).

Good luck!