Strange authoring in MIB II & A Hard Days Night

[AlainDelon]

What is going on with the weird dvd authoring in some late releases?In Men In Black II's case,the disc contains 4 identical 83.9mb trailers for Ghostbusters-3 one after another in the 271mb! VIDEO_TS.VOB and one in VTS_09.In A Hard Days Night,the first 30min of the movie is duplicated on a titleset taking up an extra 1.3Gb of space and not accessible exept when ripped on a pc.I just noticed something similar on ET where the intro by Spielberg is partially duplicated in the VIDEO_TS.VOB.Are these just mistakes by the professional authorers(hard to beleive)or is there another explanation?

[UTec]

I know what you mean. I've seen a few things like that from time to time. On StarWars II AOTC, NTSC Widescreen version, there's a duplicate (VTS_07_1.VOB, VobID2 on Disc 1) of the end credits of the deleted scenes segment on Disc 2 for which there is no access. Also, French and Spanish subtitles are present on the disc but there is no selection button in the Options menu for those (although it does have English, French and Spanish audio tracks available from the audio/subtitle menu).

Such things are not that uncommon but the bit you mentioned about the 1.3GB waste of space on A Hard Days Night is a pretty extreme example though.

My (tentative) theory:

Since they have the luxury of authoring for dual layer (lucky bastards!), maybe some of them have fallen into the lazy habit of not cleaning up before they multiplex the final VTS titleset (a far cry from us who try to scrounge every little bit of space to make everything fit on our limited DVD-5's).

OR... those errors could be the result of the author concurrently working on several projects which all are on tight schedules.... rush, rush.. and then inevitably errors occur (the industry in general often has the nasty habit of making employees do the work of 2 or 3 people instead of hiring more employees). In that respect, we have a luxury they don't have: we can afford to take our time.

[dan]

In line with what UTec said about the pro's being able to write to dual-layered discs...

I guess it sounds almost like a conspiracy theory, but there's a good chance that the authors are encouraged (by "the powers that be") to get the discs to be of a size that will necessitate a second layer. With that second layer, copying the DVD becomes more difficult [as in, it can't be decrypted as a whole by a ripper, then have the files imported right into into a DVD-Video template in a DVD burning program].

Think of how easy it is to copy a music CD. Anyone, even with little computer experience, can choose the "copy CD" template within the recording program that came with the drive and come out with a (close to) exact copy of the original. Once DVD recorder prices come down, "average" consumers [not that we're above them, we're just more, um, passionate about such things] will have grand plans of putting a DVD movie in drive D: and a DVD-R in their brand new drive E: and hook up all their friends with copies of rented movies. The DVD drives in every week's Circuit City and Best Buy advertisements all use the claim of "record movies on DVD!" to lure unknowing customers in to buy the latest $300 device that allows them to put their home movies on DVD and, oh yeah, make copies of $20 discs on $2 blanks so that they can sell them for $5 to their friends. [Call me Oliver Stone if you'd like, but that's how I see it.] Of course, once these "normal" consumers get their drive all plugged in and see that CSS is standing in their way, things change. But, actually CSS is not what is standing in their way. Given 3 minutes and Google, anyone can find how CSS works, and a comparison which chooses the best ripper. Once this "average" user decrypts the entire DVD and loads up the 'DVD-Video' template in Nero, the only thing that's standing in his (or her) way is the fact that 5 [or more] gigabytes simply won't fit on the disc.

For two of the discs I own, they push just about 5GB, and the main movie itself easily would fit onto just one layer. In fact, there would still be room left over for a reasonable [for one disc] amount of extras. Does the trailer for Ravenous need to be encoded at a constant 8000kb/s? Nope, but it helps force the disc onto two layers.

For the average computer user, the process of selectively including VOBs or streams, then authoring a disc or manipulating the IFO's so that a movie will fit onto a single layer is incredibly complex. I don't think demuxing is something that is done by casual users. Now, these casual users, provided they've ripped the main movie [well, it is selected by default in SmartRipper and DVDdecrypter], and have the VOB, then de-multiplex it, have the m2v and ac3 streams. Now, they'll have to author, but what program will accept 16:9 video or even ac3 audio? Definitely not myDVD which comes bundled with Pioneer drives. Among Sonic's products, it's not until DVDit!PE for $600 that 16:9 video (most mainstream Hollywood DVDs are anamorphic) and ac3 audio is allowed (and it's limited to stereo...no 5.1 is allowed, those Hollywood movies generally have a 5.1 track...Of course, "average" user could probably figure out which one was the pro-logic track.). Even after spending $600, and having figured out how to get just the main movie, the consumer level products are extremely limited in copying movies. [Ironically, this process can be done with the free programs of the "DVD scene", but it takes more "tech savvy." IfoEdit isn't exactly drag and drop.]

Once out of the realm of "consumer level" products, the capabilities increase, but the cost also does. The law of diminishing returns is alive and well with the difference in price between different packages of DVDit [SE vs. PE, both being consumer level] being $300 and the difference of price of Scenarist [professional level] and DVD Fusion ["pro-sumer" in my opinion] being the number of zeros at the end. Of course, Scenarist isn't a fancy version of DVDit, and is incredibly complex, but, in the end, DVDs are DVDs; does a disc created in DVDit not contain a folder called Video_TS? And once the "average" user wants to move into the advanced authoring programs, he's no longer that "average" user, as each step along the way, people give up. I'd assume that many give up as soon as CSS steps in; after that, another large number declare it impossible [or not worth the effort] once the entire decrypted Video_TS folder is rejected by the burning program for being too big for one disc.

*deep breath*


The moral of the story: the studios don't mind for discs to go to two layers, and probably encourage it.
True, many dual layer discs are much more than a mere "bump" above the single-layer ceiling [Star Wars Episode 2, as mentioned above about having odd authoring, is about 8GB], so there must be some lazy or time-pressed (probably the latter) professional authors who forget to remove a duplicate entry in the authoring program [Scenarist, I'd assume.]

And now, I step off my soapbox. I'd just like to reiterate that just because we know more about this stuff than many consumers and have the knowledge (or know the basic know-how so that things can be figured out as they come up] to completely re-author a professional DVD, that doesn't make us any more morally right in terms of copyright issues. The unoffical rule of this particular forum [which deals with Scenarist and Maestro almost exclusively] seems to be "don't ask, don't tell", so don't worry, I'm not taking some sort of moral stand or anything, but movies are protected by the same laws that protect software. [Discounting, of course, some recent efforts of the MPAA, where the laws are a bit more, in my opinion, "iffy".] Of course, I'll join in the collective head shaking when someone releases a commercial program that can 100% successfully and dependably copy the entire contents of dual-layer discs to dvd-rs, being that the release of a dependable program for that automates that process is only a matter of time. We'll all tell stories of "how hard it was to understand the navigation structure in Scenarist, but once we did, it was [I]so rewarding" and "you don't appreciate how hard the authoring process is" and how we "walked 10 miles, uphill both ways in the snow". But that's progress.

Well, let's hear it for going off topic and introducing my personal philosophy about these things into the mix.

Dan

[auenf]

Originally posted by dan
The moral of the story: the studios don't mind for discs to go to two layers, and probably encourage it.

and it is that reason why some studios are pushing the 'superbit' concept.

Enf...

[AlainDelon]

dan:I guess it sounds almost like a conspiracy theory, but there's a good chance that the authorers are encouraged (by "the powers that be") to get the discs to be of a size that will necessitate a second layer. With that second layer, copying the DVD becomes more difficult [as in, it can't be decrypted as a whole by a ripper, then importing the decrypted files right into a DVD-Video template in a DVD burning program].I posted a while back in the general forum about the worst example of this i've ever seen but the thread detereorated to other subjects.

http://forum.doom9.org/showthread.php?s=&threadid=35920&highlight=big+trouble