DVD RB Pro possible feature req

[SamuriHL]

First off, much praise for an incredibly awesome product! This is a feature request only if it's easy and possible. :) I have a bunch of PAL formatted DVD's that I'd love to convert to NTSC. Is this a feature that can be added to DVD RB Pro? In this case, these are episode discs that I'd like to do a full disc backup on and have it converted to NTSC format. Thanks again for an awesome product!

[Video Dude]

This was discussed in another thread a short time back.

To summarize, it was suggested that jdobbs use Don Graft's pulldown method to do the video conversion so the audio would not have to be re-encoded. jdobbs said this would not be hard implement but he was afraid that not all dvd players will be able to play it.
Source: http://forum.doom9.org/showthread.php?t=97626

In another thread DGPulldown and DVD Spec compliancy? , mpucoder said this pulldown method is fully compliant. http://forum.doom9.org/showthread.php?t=98569


Of course this would have to be in Movie Only Mode, since DVD-RB does not process menus.

Perhaps jdobbs will reconsider for version 1.1 (mpucoder posted its compliant) ... :D

[SamuriHL]

Jeeze...I know the rules, I should have searched for this. I apologize. Movie only wouldn't work for what I need to do cause I'd only ever get the first episode. One of these days I'll do the conversion by hand...just been too lazy. :) Thanks for the info.

[jdobbs]

Hmmm... since MPUCODER is my hero and knows more about this stuff than anyone I know, and he says it's compliant, I concede the point.

I'll take a look at it and may be able to add it in v1.10.

[SamuriHL]

Thank you! You truly rock. :) I still don't know if you'd be able to support episode discs, though. That's ok...I still think this would be a very useful feature and one that no other transcoder/reencoder has afaik.

[SamuriHL]

Oh, and also, if you need someone to test that feature I'd be more than willing. I'm a software developer myself so I understand the need for good testers. And I have one of the fussiest stand alone DVD players known to man when it comes to PAL conversions. I've tried all the "quick" methods and none of them work with my player. I've not tried this method so I have no idea if it'd work or not but I'm definitely willing to give it a shot.

[Skunk]

Hate to get too far off topic, but this post gets me thinking about another feature that would be awesome to have. When you say you are doing an episode disk I can't help but think that it would be awesome if you could tell DVD-RB which VTS you want it to treat as the main movie.

I have had a disk or 2 that hat a few large VTS (usually disks with alot of special features, but episode disks would be another good example), and I would get alot of use out of this.

[k2002rahmani]

Just use the segment preview feature and blank manually. That is the best way to do this.

[lumier]

First I want to say (as many others have done) how impressed I am with DVD-RB, it is by far the best DVD backup software out there.

I am backing up quite a lot of my DVD's lately and thus the number of "workflow" steps it takes to create the backup becomes quite important to me (e.g. I just love that DVD-RB can automatically burn DVD's after ISO creation, one click on the backup button and it is all done ...).

Now I find that I typically want to keep all DVD-Extras EXCEPT previews. And in 90% of the cases these extras correspond exacty to some (easily identified) VTS sets.

So I only want to keep some of the VTS sets of the DVD.

Now the current way to do this is to prepare / use the segment preview and blank unwanted VTS / encode / rebuild / burn on DVD, e.g. five steps that take me a significant amount of time to supervise, especially because of the "wait time" involved (e.g. waiting for the preparation step to finish before I can do the blanking).
All of this would become one easy step (saving me tons of time), if I could choose the VTS sets DVD-RB includes in the rebuild in the same way we currently decide on the audio tracks to include.

The feature I have in mind would be a checkbox for each VTS, displayed under input settings (e.g. somewhere close to the place where we mark the audio streams to include). If the checkbox is not marked all segments in the VTS are automatically blanked / the VTS is not included in the rebuilt - whatever is easier to implement. This way you can still use the one click mode with automatically burned DVD :), even when you want to exclude specific VTS.

What do you guys think? Would such a feature be helpful for others?

[spammeh]

a quicker way to blank would be awesome :)

[jptheripper]

the problem with blanking by uncheck is rebuilder uses the avs 's to preview (i believe) and therefore the you must do the prepare stage first.

[lumier]

I am glad to hear that some of you would also benefit from a quicker method to tell DVD-RB about our blanking decision (than waiting for the preparation step to finish).

It would be fine for me if the prepare stage works exactly as before as long as DVD-RB would remember the unchecked VTS sets and blank them automatically.

As I said before, the point for me is not so much the actual time of an encode (because the PC can run overnight by itself), but the time I have to spend supervising some of the encoding steps (e.g. waiting / checking if step X is finished).

If there would be a way to tell DVD-RB some of my blanking decisions BEFORE the preparation step, it would save me a lot of time. I typically already know what VTS sets to blank before calling DVD-RB (thanks to a quick inspection of the DVD/individual VOBs with my prefered DVD player software).

[NightSta]

In another thread DGPulldown and DVD Spec compliancy? , mpucoder said this pulldown method is fully compliant. http://forum.doom9.org/showthread.php?t=98569

Of course this would have to be in Movie Only Mode, since DVD-RB does not process menus.

Perhaps jdobbs will reconsider for version 1.1 (mpucoder posted its compliant) ... :D
The only down side I see is while it may be DVD-compliant, not all DVD players observe "full" compliancy. I think players have come a long way over the last few years (example: different lasers to play burned discs, added codecs for xVid/DivX, etc) and probably a lesser concern than it once was. But "picky" players are still produced even nowadays, hopefully not as much.

[SamuriHL]

Which is why I said I'd be happy to test it as I have one of the fussiest DVD players known to man. It annoys me so much that I usually end up using my Xbox to watch movies! :) If it works for me, it's likely it'd work for most people. Maybe not all, but, the majority.

[Skunk]

I hate to say it, but DVD-RB is not the best way to blank sections of a dvd. I use DVDRemake to blank all unwanted material before rebuilding. Try it out and I am sure you will be impressed. I pray that Jdobbs will work wiith Dimad to make these 2 programs even more compatible but that will likely not be possible in the near future.

[blutach]

Even quicker than anything else is PgcEdit - if you wanna blank the whole titleset (it's one click). If you just wanna blank a title within a titleset (or a cell or cut the movie), VobBlanker is best - IMHO.

Also Menushrink to shrivel gigantic menus down to tiny, but workable, stills.

These 3 free pre-processing tools, supported in our IFO/VOB Editors forum will give you maximum bang from dvdrb.

Regards