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23rd September 2009, 15:16 | #1 | Link |
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MKV as DVD replacement possible?
I'd like to convert a few thousand DVDs into AVC MKV files. My hope is to convert them into a format with data and physical size advantage which should also be somewhat independent of storage medium and playable on a variety of soft and hard decoders such as WD TV, PC, BluRay player, etc. I am not interested in downsizing or deinterlacing at all. The original frame size and interlace/progressive structure must remain.
The DVDs have 2 primary structures: 1) Homemade captures with very simple menus (no chapters, no angles but they DO frequently have CC embedded in the VOB) 2) Full commercial discs which can have very complex structures. Converting #1 above to AVC en masse is simple. The data will be ripped into various source directories using basic DVD ripping software to yield single-file source, even if the file is longer than the 1G DVD VOB standard. When a batch has been ripped, they'll be encoded with x264. Goal is to use VBR to yield files half the size of the original. This will allow comparison with new captures from DVR (DirecTV with TiVo) of the same file. If a new MPEG2 version of an existing source is significantly more than 2X the size of the new MKV it will probably be encoded and stored as the new baseline. DirecTV varies the bitrate, sometimes dramatically, which can affect quality, of course. However, IF simple profile MPEG4 can truly give the 2:1 data ratio I seek without perceptible quality loss, I'd prefer to use it for such simple sources and convert the CC into subtitle files to accompany the encodes. Is simple profile MPEG4 capable of this? Converting #2 is not so simple. In many cases, the menu structure is critical. If at all possible, I'd like to keep all the functions of the DVD control structure such as chapters, angles, audio tracks, subtitles, etc. I have VERY limited experience with h.264 and mkv. The last time I dabbled with MPEG4 was pre-AVC/VC-1 when the propaganda stated equal quality with MPEG2 in half the size...it didn't pan out. Now, mkv supports multiple audio and subtitle tracks. There are quite a few threads here about converting commercial SD and HD discs to mkv. What I don't see, or haven't found, is something akin to DVD RB Pro which can take a DVD structure and yield an mkv equivalent, preserving all the user interface of the source DVD. Does such a thing exist? If so, where? If not, are there any automated ways to take a DVD IFO/VOB set and generate the various components which go into the mkv? The more automation, the better, as long as 2-pass x264 and custom AviSynth filters can be used. In this case, the highly complex DVDs would not be processed, only the simple ones.
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Reclusive fart. Collecting Military, Trains, Cooking, Woodworking, Fighting Illini, Auburn Tigers Last edited by FredThompson; 23rd September 2009 at 15:23. Reason: I'm AD...oh, look, a bird! |
23rd September 2009, 15:34 | #2 | Link |
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Why would you want to re-encode something without deinterlacing it? Especially for all those cases of telecine and not actual interlacing. As far as I know, you just need the following:
Decrypt DGIndex DVD2MKV chapters thingy Automagic encoding Automagic muxing Looks easy enough. I think MEGUI might even cover most of these. Edit: Oh, right, if by "all the user interface," you mean DVD menus, have fun with that. MKV menus have been vaporware from the start so the chances of that happening are less than 0. |
23rd September 2009, 17:10 | #3 | Link |
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You made a lot of erroneous assumptions.
Interlace /= telecine. Interlaced video has twice the temporal information of progressive video with the same frame rate. "Converting" Interlaced video to progressive video destroys the temporal information. No matter how sophisticated the conversion, there are always problems. Try it on a subject which is spinning perpendicular to the camera. Look at high motion subjects on regular and double-rate LCD displays and you'll see a huge difference. "DVD2MKV chapters thingy" is a concept. I'm looking for a manifested tool for the concept. There is precedent: http://forum.corecodec.com/viewtopic.php?f=15&t=54 http://forum.corecodec.com/viewtopic.php?f=14&t=1973 http://forum.corecodec.com/viewtopic.php?f=14&t=2966 Given MKV is a container which supports chapters and some rudimentary menus have been seen "in the wild" there is ample reason to believe robust control structures should be possible. MKV is a container, just as ISO or AVi are containers. DVD Menus are nothing more than video "chapters" with some control logic. I should have stated MKV is not a requirement. Functionality is the goal, MKV is a perceived means to portability.
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Reclusive fart. Collecting Military, Trains, Cooking, Woodworking, Fighting Illini, Auburn Tigers Last edited by FredThompson; 23rd September 2009 at 17:13. |
23rd September 2009, 17:37 | #4 | Link | ||
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If I were you, I'd just rip to full disc images. If some player can't handle them, write a script to encode the video titles to a supported format but keep the original images around. |
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23rd September 2009, 19:43 | #5 | Link | |
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I would also like a tool that extracted all parts of a DVD separately and encoded them all according to settings I specified, but I doubt it exists as yet. |
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23rd September 2009, 19:53 | #6 | Link |
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After a very brief googling, I found http://www.videohelp.com/tools/ChapterXtractor
I believe that if you add this to the chain I proposed earlier, that essentially leaves us with only the menus missing. Since MKV menu implementation has a 0% chance of ever being finished, as MKV development is essentially dead, I think this is as close as you'll ever get. Last edited by thewebchat; 23rd September 2009 at 19:56. |
23rd September 2009, 21:13 | #8 | Link | |
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In any case, the kind of chaptering FredThompson was looking for is actually a command structure as well as a playback interface it. Which, as you pointed out, doesn't exist and may not for some time to come. A command/menu structure would be nice to have, it's true. |
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23rd September 2009, 21:33 | #9 | Link | ||||
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I'm still looking for a good example. One of the posts I mentioned above has a dead link. My guess is such a menu is a simple branch at the beginning and was only to pick language and subtitle. There's a post at the KMPlayer board stating MPC supports them but KMPlayer does not. Quote:
@neuron2, howdy! How's kicks? edit: I'm having trouble finding the forum link I read earlier today which supposedly linked to an MKV sample file with a menu. The link didn't work but the thread mentioned a simple menu which used the first 2 chapter points of the sample data. I'll keep searching. AutoMKV Chapters: http://forums.animesuki.com/showthread.php?t=85641 101 things you never knew you could do with Matroska: http://www.mod16.org/hurfdurf/?p=8 and http://forums.animesuki.com/showthread.php?t=59561 maybe the anime subculture will figure this out first... I guess the easiest option would be to add DVD XML and pointers to MKV ignoring the pesky little detail of licensing. Where's derrow and why hasn't he done what I desire :P
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Reclusive fart. Collecting Military, Trains, Cooking, Woodworking, Fighting Illini, Auburn Tigers Last edited by FredThompson; 23rd September 2009 at 22:25. |
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24th September 2009, 01:03 | #10 | Link |
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He is talking out of his a**. We have and continue to be active with Matroska development leading towards 2.0. As I have stated here at D9 a few times we have completed EBML 2.0, which is a complete rewrite and is already included in CorePlayer 1.3.x and our upcoming 2.0 release. We are also working on LibMatroska 2.0 which will also have a new Matroska Parser Library utilizing Core-C (our modular ANSI C language), these are also a complete re-writes. However, we have sloooowed things down a bit for 2.0 to allow 1.x to gain adoption ( no need to mess with what works ), stopped devel? Hell no.
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Dan "BetaBoy" Marlin Ubiquitous Multimedia Technologies and Developer Tools http://corecodec.com Last edited by BetaBoy; 24th September 2009 at 01:52. |
24th September 2009, 01:33 | #11 | Link |
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On Matroska menus... As we discussed a while back about them. The proposed menu system is 100% reliant on the means to display them (software and hardware) as the specs state. So while the elements can be defined, the means for playback still needs to know the how/where/what to do with them. So technically you could just stuff a current 'Cocktail' menu in Matroska as long as the means to handle all the 'web' elements are handled in the player.
On DVD Menu Extractor (or DMX as we call it), here it is in SVN. https://svn.matroska.org/svn/matrosk...dMenuXtractor/
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Dan "BetaBoy" Marlin Ubiquitous Multimedia Technologies and Developer Tools http://corecodec.com Last edited by BetaBoy; 24th September 2009 at 01:52. |
24th September 2009, 02:23 | #12 | Link |
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Thanks for the link. I noticed it's gone from the closed thread in the corecodec forum.
Out of curiosity, is the mkv support in commercial devices such as WD TV a result of direct consultation with CoreCodec or did it just happen? IIRC, the main restriction with DVD and BD control structures is the copyright on the set of functions and resultant licensing fees to support...restriction of competition and an administrative staff...my opinion. We're looking at a horse and cart situation, yes? I did notice some discussion in the WD TV hobbyist areas of modified firmware, including discussion of menus in mkv but no realization of the concept. There's also a post in your forum about QuickTime-like menus as HTML with a browser for playback. Maybe an IFO set with mkv component files instead of VOB might be an interim method for proof of concept but IFO includes absolute pointers based on sectors.
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24th September 2009, 05:10 | #13 | Link | ||||
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24th September 2009, 07:20 | #14 | Link |
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Hmm...if you edit a DVD menu to remove stuff like Disney's on-disc games and ignore alpha-blending and logic for play-once portions and such, what is a DVD menu, really? It's a liked list of video clips. Still images are just I-frames. IIRC, DVD Stripper completely fragmented a DVD source into all the individual components. Do that and, essentially, parse only the navigation links into MKV links. Then again, it's also almost 3 AM here so...
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2nd August 2011, 05:05 | #15 | Link | |
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http://forum.doom9.org/showthread.ph...801#post768801 |
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2nd August 2011, 05:14 | #16 | Link | |
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applications do not support the standards and the standard doesn't get finished due to lacking software support. reminds me of lyrics3 and id3v2.4 specs (which had been out for ~10 years) |
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2nd August 2011, 06:46 | #17 | Link | |
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While H.264 yields smaller file size at a given quality (progressive or not) I still use xvid for SD material. MakeMKV keeps chapters but does not encode but I'm pretty sure Staxrip, Handbrake or MeGUI will also transfer chapters to MKV. Thus ripping the main movie with DVDFab and encoding to MKV should be easy enough. I just don't know why you would need menus any more. The file browser of any player is good enough to select a certain ep of a TV show, why complicate things?
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2nd August 2011, 07:21 | #19 | Link |
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Because there's no container that properly could handle them. Why dont you just accept that premise? Besides, players like WD TV display jpgs as thumbnails or even screen sized pictures which would allow for keeping some of this artwork. Feel free to complicate things as much as you like.
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2nd August 2011, 07:59 | #20 | Link | ||
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There are people who can't distinguish between a still image and a full interactive menu with video, sound, links, multimedia design, etc.
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And possibly a wrong one, that is. Quote:
Last edited by lovelove; 2nd August 2011 at 08:02. |
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