Jafco
7th February 2003, 01:35
Hi, to jdobbs and the DVD2One authors, thanks for your contributions, they're amazing.
First, as some brief background, I've done a ton of DVD's with IFOUpdate, in Standard, Multi-PGC Maestro, and the latest Adjusted Cell Mode (I've never used plain ol' cell mode, though). In almost all of the circumstances, I've gotten the discs working exactly as intended.
With the new MakeItEasy tool, I've encountered a bit of a snag, but I've been able to work around it, and get the disc working completely correctly as intended. It's not clear whether the glitches stem from MakeItEasy, or from DVD2One -- I'll leave that to the respective authors to deduce, or perhaps a friendly doom9 forum reader. :)
Disc: Malcom In The Middle, Season 1, Disc 1, R1 NTSC.
Details: The disc is not suitable for the previously tried and true IFOUpdate/CCE/Maestro conversion techniques. Multi-PGC won't work, because one of the playlists uses bits and pieces of all 6 episodes, not even broken at the standard chapter points. Adjusted cell mode won't work, unfortunately, because of Maestro's 99 chapter limitation, and I believe that there are 120 or 121 chapters that Adjusted cell mode would require. Thus, I thought I'd try the MakeItEasy/DVD2One technique. (Also, I don't want anyone to think that I made a simple mistake of mixing up the IFO files, etc.).
Initial Procedure (which resulted in a 90% functioning disc):
1. Pad source files with appropriate amount of data, using MakeItEasy v0.12, in this case only about 310 MB was needed, as VTS1 is 97% of the disc.
2. Run IFOEdit to generate the IFO files for the padded sources. {Then I did a "Get VTS Sectors" -- Can that hurt?} The IFO's worked fine, when playing the set in WinDVD.
3. Ran DVD2One to compress the set to 4.37 Gigs. Left all audio and subpicture streams, for a fully functioning backup.
4. Unpadded with MakeItEasy. Moved the unpadded files back to the rest of the original DVD structure.
5. Updated IFO files with MakeItEasy, pointing correctly to the original IFO, and to the DVD2One Destination IFO.
The completed structure played absolutely correctly in WinDVD and PowerDVD XP.
Then, I tried to burn in Nero 5.5.9.17. First, I received an error I had never seen, which was: "VTS_01_0.IFO is not identical to VTS_01_0.BUP." I thought that was strange, especially since they were both updated by MakeItEasy. However, I deleted the .BUP file, and duplicated the .IFO file, so that they would be identical.
The next error I got when trying to burn with Nero was "Required file VTS_01_6.VOB is missing." Well, there's not supposed to be one, but somewhere in one of the IFO's, something must be indicating to Nero that it should be there. Because jdobbs said that Nero is too error prone (even though I had no problems with IFOUpdate before this), I burned it with RecordNowMax, which didn't complain about file number 6.
All was well on playback in the standalone, except for the last 7 minutes of the last episode (which corresponded exactly to the break between VOB file number 4 and VOB file number 5). My standalone would never play number 5, just return me to the main menu (the PC WinDVD player had no such difficulty). All other navigational aspects of the disc worked fine in the standalone player.
So, on a hunch that something wasn't quite right, I decided to re-create the procedure, but substitute my old tried-and-true methods whereever possible.
New procedure which generated a completely correctly functioning disc, that burned in Nero with no errors:
1. Pad source files with appropriate amount of data, using MakeItEasy v0.12, in this case only about 310 MB was needed, as VTS1 is 97% of the disc.
2. Run IFOEdit to generate the IFO files for the padded sources. {Then I did a "Get VTS Sectors" -- Can that hurt?} The IFO's worked fine, when playing the set in WinDVD.
3. Ran DVD2One to compress the set to 4.37 Gigs. Left all audio and subpicture streams, for a fully functioning backup.
4. Unpadded with MakeItEasy. Moved the unpadded files back to the rest of the original DVD structure.
^^^^^ All same as before. vvvv Different steps
5. Took the newly unpadded VOB files, and in a separate directory, used IFOEdit to create new IFO's.
6. Moved the unpadded VOB's to the rest of the original DVD files.
7. Used the newly created IFO's, and the unpadded VOB's together with IFOUpdate 0.63, in Adjusted Cell Mode, to update the IFO's of the original disc.
Burned with Nero, and disc completely functional.
Note: I did Step 5, because IFOUpdate 0.63 would not accept the IFO's that DVD2One had created (perhaps because they had information regarding the no-longer present padding)? It claimed that there were too many cells in the newly authored IFO. Using IFOEdit to create new IFO's from those VOB's was perfectly acceptable to IFOUpdate.
My guess is that the IFOUpdate routines that got incorporated into MakeItEasy may not be accounting for the "phantom cells" that correspond to the padding. Alternatively, the IFO's generated by DVD2One might contain erroneous references to VTS_01_6.VOB, instead of "5"?
Anyhow, I appreciate any comments or thoughts. Thanks.
First, as some brief background, I've done a ton of DVD's with IFOUpdate, in Standard, Multi-PGC Maestro, and the latest Adjusted Cell Mode (I've never used plain ol' cell mode, though). In almost all of the circumstances, I've gotten the discs working exactly as intended.
With the new MakeItEasy tool, I've encountered a bit of a snag, but I've been able to work around it, and get the disc working completely correctly as intended. It's not clear whether the glitches stem from MakeItEasy, or from DVD2One -- I'll leave that to the respective authors to deduce, or perhaps a friendly doom9 forum reader. :)
Disc: Malcom In The Middle, Season 1, Disc 1, R1 NTSC.
Details: The disc is not suitable for the previously tried and true IFOUpdate/CCE/Maestro conversion techniques. Multi-PGC won't work, because one of the playlists uses bits and pieces of all 6 episodes, not even broken at the standard chapter points. Adjusted cell mode won't work, unfortunately, because of Maestro's 99 chapter limitation, and I believe that there are 120 or 121 chapters that Adjusted cell mode would require. Thus, I thought I'd try the MakeItEasy/DVD2One technique. (Also, I don't want anyone to think that I made a simple mistake of mixing up the IFO files, etc.).
Initial Procedure (which resulted in a 90% functioning disc):
1. Pad source files with appropriate amount of data, using MakeItEasy v0.12, in this case only about 310 MB was needed, as VTS1 is 97% of the disc.
2. Run IFOEdit to generate the IFO files for the padded sources. {Then I did a "Get VTS Sectors" -- Can that hurt?} The IFO's worked fine, when playing the set in WinDVD.
3. Ran DVD2One to compress the set to 4.37 Gigs. Left all audio and subpicture streams, for a fully functioning backup.
4. Unpadded with MakeItEasy. Moved the unpadded files back to the rest of the original DVD structure.
5. Updated IFO files with MakeItEasy, pointing correctly to the original IFO, and to the DVD2One Destination IFO.
The completed structure played absolutely correctly in WinDVD and PowerDVD XP.
Then, I tried to burn in Nero 5.5.9.17. First, I received an error I had never seen, which was: "VTS_01_0.IFO is not identical to VTS_01_0.BUP." I thought that was strange, especially since they were both updated by MakeItEasy. However, I deleted the .BUP file, and duplicated the .IFO file, so that they would be identical.
The next error I got when trying to burn with Nero was "Required file VTS_01_6.VOB is missing." Well, there's not supposed to be one, but somewhere in one of the IFO's, something must be indicating to Nero that it should be there. Because jdobbs said that Nero is too error prone (even though I had no problems with IFOUpdate before this), I burned it with RecordNowMax, which didn't complain about file number 6.
All was well on playback in the standalone, except for the last 7 minutes of the last episode (which corresponded exactly to the break between VOB file number 4 and VOB file number 5). My standalone would never play number 5, just return me to the main menu (the PC WinDVD player had no such difficulty). All other navigational aspects of the disc worked fine in the standalone player.
So, on a hunch that something wasn't quite right, I decided to re-create the procedure, but substitute my old tried-and-true methods whereever possible.
New procedure which generated a completely correctly functioning disc, that burned in Nero with no errors:
1. Pad source files with appropriate amount of data, using MakeItEasy v0.12, in this case only about 310 MB was needed, as VTS1 is 97% of the disc.
2. Run IFOEdit to generate the IFO files for the padded sources. {Then I did a "Get VTS Sectors" -- Can that hurt?} The IFO's worked fine, when playing the set in WinDVD.
3. Ran DVD2One to compress the set to 4.37 Gigs. Left all audio and subpicture streams, for a fully functioning backup.
4. Unpadded with MakeItEasy. Moved the unpadded files back to the rest of the original DVD structure.
^^^^^ All same as before. vvvv Different steps
5. Took the newly unpadded VOB files, and in a separate directory, used IFOEdit to create new IFO's.
6. Moved the unpadded VOB's to the rest of the original DVD files.
7. Used the newly created IFO's, and the unpadded VOB's together with IFOUpdate 0.63, in Adjusted Cell Mode, to update the IFO's of the original disc.
Burned with Nero, and disc completely functional.
Note: I did Step 5, because IFOUpdate 0.63 would not accept the IFO's that DVD2One had created (perhaps because they had information regarding the no-longer present padding)? It claimed that there were too many cells in the newly authored IFO. Using IFOEdit to create new IFO's from those VOB's was perfectly acceptable to IFOUpdate.
My guess is that the IFOUpdate routines that got incorporated into MakeItEasy may not be accounting for the "phantom cells" that correspond to the padding. Alternatively, the IFO's generated by DVD2One might contain erroneous references to VTS_01_6.VOB, instead of "5"?
Anyhow, I appreciate any comments or thoughts. Thanks.