Muxman - simple DVD authoring

[mpucoder]

Two years ago (or was it three?) I set about gathering information so that I could write an authoring program. But a couple things got in the way, and all the world got was the information I had gathered.
Now things are finally back to normal. Yes, the crackhead girlfriend is finally gone (my apologies to Germany, where she decided to go next).
Anyway, the centerpiece of any authoring program is its multiplexer, so I wrote that first and designed a simple authoring program to test it. It is available at www.mpucoder.com/Muxman

My plans are to further develope this into a program rivaling Scenarist. Such a program, however, would not be free. But this program, along with bugfixes and some later improvements, will continue to be available and free. At some point there will be two, or maybe more, versions ranging from free on up.

[lark]

The product of Muxman is virtually identical to that of Scenarist, and far superior to any mplex based authoring program.

sounds too good to be true!

regards
t

[mpucoder]

For the sceptics I published the verification results. See the link on the page.

[Trahald]

Excellent.. great work mpucoder.

Originally posted by mpucoder
... Yes, the crackhead girlfriend is finally gone (my apologies to Germany, where she decided to go next).

LOL!

[Trahald]

I demuxed one of the features from The Two Towers extended.. disk 4 appendices (the feature that goes into the premiers for TTT) powerdvd plays it fine except for right before the london premier where Billy boyd is talking (about the 2:20 minute mark) it glitches there and you cant rewind over it. Windvd and IFOEdits player both can barely play the output( the video stutters behind the audio the whole way). This is a NTSC (almost pure 29.97) video right off the dvd. Just to parallel i muxed it in scenarist and was fine.

[mpucoder]

Were there any errors reported? Look in c:\muxman.log

[Trahald]

Opened video file D:\TWO_TOWERS_EXT_D4\VIDEO_TS\VTS_01_1 - 0xE0 - Video - MPEG-2 - 720x480 (NTSC) - 16~9 - Letterboxed.M2V, 275750255 bytes.
Opened audio 1 file D:\TWO_TOWERS_EXT_D4\VIDEO_TS\VTS_01_1 - 0x80 - Audio - AC3 - 2ch - 48kHz - DRC - English - DELAY -66ms_fixed.ac3.
AC3 audio, frame size = 0x300.
10:33:29 Begin multiplex.
SeqEnd at 106F880A.
SeqEnd at 106F9D6B.
Bytes remaining in buffer = 0.
10:34:27 End multiplex.
Fields: 34046, VOBU: 1362, Sectors: 145013.

[mpucoder]

The 2 SeqEnd is probably the cause of the problem with this video. There is one part of Muxman that didn't make it for this week that deals with short VOBU's. And SeqEnd can, and usually does, create a short VOBU. Here's what happens: A SeqEnd marks the end of encoding, and also forces the multiplexer to end the current VOBU. If that VOBU is less than 0.4 seconds long it should be merged with the VOBU prior to it. But since Muxman is a single pass multiplexer it doesn't know about this until after it has happened. I'm still working on the process of backing up to join them together. The cases I ran into didn't have SeqEnd close together, so the player was able to recover.

Just bad luck, I hope, on your choice of material. But it is something I'm aware of and working on.

I also noticed a negative audio delay. This is something I'm going to be writting about on my website, as it has really gotten out of hand. The bottom line is if you need a negative audio delay something is wrong with the software you are using. I believe it all started with dvd2avi not handling closed GOPs properly, and has persisted like a bad urban legend ever since. Donald Graft (neuron2) has written a corrected version of the program, you can get it here
Another source of negative delay is demuxing by VobID. This would be a great idea if implemented properly, but it isn't by any program I tried. What goes wrong? In a seamless VOB joint, like those found within a title, some audio for the first VOB is multiplexed into the second. But during demux all the programs start and stop on the VOB boundary, leaving out the tail end of the audio and grabbing extra at the beginning.

But, IF you demux and never pass the video through dvd2avi or avisynth, AND this starts with the first VobID of the title, negative audio delay is not possible, and should not be "corrected" for.

[Trahald]

OK.. I encoded video from the file and remuxed.. now plays perfect on powerdvd.. but the video still stutters on ifoeditplayer and windvd (the audio plays through w/out problems or pause)
here is the new log

Opened video file D:\TWO_TOWERS_EXT_D4\VIDEO_TS\reencode.mpv, 428434548 bytes.
Opened audio 1 file D:\TWO_TOWERS_EXT_D4\VIDEO_TS\VTS_01_1 - 0x80 - Audio - AC3 - 2ch - 48kHz - DRC - English - DELAY -66ms_fixed.ac3.
AC3 audio, frame size = 0x300.
13:04:24 Begin multiplex.
SeqEnd at 19896470.
Bytes remaining in buffer = 0.
13:06:03 End multiplex.
Fields: 34045, VOBU: 1418, Sectors: 220459.

im going to totally reencode the audio and remux and see what happens

[LigH]

One of the users in the german board, who is not so good in English, asked me to report the following:

This tool does not work well with still menus with audio streams. If there is one video frame, and several "frames" of audio below an beyond, you shall stuff the video stream with NAV packs, as some kind of padding to ensure a consecutively advancing timecode.

[Matthew]

Good luck

Shame it doesn't have command-line support though Otherwise I would use it instead of DVDAuthor when doing scripted avi->DVD-Video. For the moment, if I want a GUI I'll use maestro :/

[mpucoder]

Originally posted by LigH
One of the users in the german board, who is not so good in English, asked me to report the following:

This tool does not work well with still menus with audio streams. If there is one video frame, and several "frames" of audio below an beyond, you shall stuff the video stream with NAV packs, as some kind of padding to ensure a consecutively advancing timecode.

It is not intended to work with stills and menues yet.

[mpucoder]

Originally posted by Matthew
Good luck

Shame it doesn't have command-line support though Otherwise I would use it instead of DVDAuthor when doing scripted avi->DVD-Video. For the moment, if I want a GUI I'll use maestro :/

It will have a CLI once the use of project files is working.

[lark]

i tried muxman briefly yesterday and discovered following:

- cannot select subpictures before video is seleted => crashes (perhaps the same for audio, but i didn't test)
- if destination folder doesn't exist, muxman seems to work correctly (muxes), but there's neither any output (at least i couldn't find) nor error messages

- not quite sure if 2 subs works, i tried, but at least powerdvd listed only 1

regards
t

[mpucoder]

Both of the first 2 are fixed in the next release.

The second subpicture is mapped wrong. Regardless of aspect ratio sub 1 is the 4:3 and sub 2 is LB, which is total nonsense. In order to really fix it more dialog is needed for 16:9 to select the wide, LB, and PS versions of a language (not to mention set the language and extension). So that will take a little time.

I hadn't planned to release every day anyway, but to fix as many problems as possible each week.

[jptheripper]

look forward to using

not sure if you are familiar with subtitle workshop. If you are, I will be loading an sst file into to do some editing and need to know what format to export the subs in.

Ifo-edit isnt a format but almost everything else is

[mean]

There is one thing i did not get
The comparison is that muxman get almost the same output as scenarist while mplex output is different.

But how does it make it better or worse ?

[mpucoder]

The problem I ran into with subs was the huge number of formats and lack of documentation for them. Using the IfoEdit format is admittedly, a hack to add the same functionality as IfoEdit (and therefore get its users to try Muxman). I also ran into many utilities to convert amongst the formats, but that, too, is not a solution.

I believe .sst is a must to support, Maestro's format an option. I just need a good document on the format, or even a good informal explanation.

[SeeMoreDigital]

Lovely tool mpucoder... many thanks!


Cheers

[Malcolm]

hi mpucoder,
great work! Thanks!

Unfortunately it seems that muxman has some problems with mp2 files. muxman always says 'audio type not recognized' and it refuses to add the mp2 file. this happens with all of my mp2 files that come from digital DVB capture (Germany, PAL). the mp2 files are demuxed from the captured DVB mpg file using ProjectX and then cut using Cuttermaran. i have no problems using these mp2 files with other programs (Winamp, BeSweet, IfoEdit, Media Player Classic, etc. pp.) if i try to use other mp2 files that i have produced myself with BeSweet by reencoding the original mp2 file from DVB, then Muxman accepts them.

i have added the first 100 kB from a mp2 file that does not work with Muxman. (DVB -> ProjectX -> Cuttermaran)
Here's the link: http://tinyurl.com/47ef6

greetings,
Malcolm