Can I reduce size (quality/bitrate) of menu?

[Hubahop]

Hi all,

I am trying to backup a dvd with a very large menu. There is a separate vob file of some 600-700 MB that contains the menu. This is a lot, I think, and if I could reduce this by half, say, or two thirds, the movie itself would get 15-20 percent more space. After all, the quality of the menu isn't that important. But is this possible?

In DVD-RB (0.95) the menu doesn't appear as a VTS, only the movie itself and the extras. I also can't see how to do it in RB-Opt. The vob file in question (the menu) does not show as a cell - if it did, I could simply reduce the bitrate for it. Is there some way to do this?

Thanks.

[blutach]

Preprocess with MenuShrink - see my sig. It shrinks huge monster menus to tiny stills.

Amazing results - you will get it to under 10Mb. The record saved is about 2.5Gb (yes!)

Regards

[Boulder]

And if you want to keep motion menus, use NuMenu4U.

[Hubahop]

Thanks! So I would first copy the files to my HDD with DVD Decrypter, then shrink the menu, and then run DVD-RB normally on the files, including the shrinked menu?

Do you know if there is a way to keep the motion menu (instead of turning it into stills), but still shrink it (reduce the bitrate)?

[Boulder]

As I said, use NuMenu4U. It will re-encode the menus to a specified bitrate/Q value which will result in better quality than using DVD Shrink on them.

[blutach]

Motion menus are nice and each to his own, but IMHO, you'd want the best quality from the movie, not the menu. Like...you're there to watch the movie, aren't you? :)

The ability to save 700Mb would be just too enticing to me. But I'm just one voice.

Another good reason to preprocess the menus is that often, you will see minutes, sometimes hours, of unreferenced blackness in VIDEO_TS.VOB. This can, and does, take up Gb. Get rid of it with VobBlanker or MenuShrink.

Regards

[Hubahop]

Boulder, thanks, I didn't see your first post. Do I need Scenarist if I only want to shrink the menu? The help files seems to be a bit contradictory here, or at least I don't get it.

[Hubahop]

Blutach, good point - I hear you. On the other hand, if I could keep the motion menu and shrink it to a couple of hundred MBs, then I could live with it. It seems like a fair trade-off between movie quality on the one hand and keeping the "feel" of the DVD on the other. I'll try out MenuShrink also, though, to see what it does.

[roux]

Mostly the menu consists out of different languages. So if there are other menu language’s present you can reduce the total size by a lot if you hide them. You can find and hide them for example with DvdReMake. Try the DvdReMake demo here: http://www.dimadsoft.com/dvdremakepro/index.php

[jdobbs]

I have menu reencoding on my wish list for v1.10. In the meantime, as has been pointed out, there are third party tools that can do it for you.

[Zeul]

NuMenu4u will remove unwanted langauges AND unreferrenced material (usually in the VIDEO_TS.VOB), automatically. It does require access to Scenarist or Muxman (If you are a VIP user), however.

[blutach]

@roux/Hubahop - one area that I get infuriated with is when authoring houses don't put in different LUs. To get around this, you can reassign the cells that belong to the unwanted foreign languages to your own language (I use PgcEdit for this) and then strip out the now unreferenced cells with VobBlanker. This can save heaps of Mb in menus and requires no real reauthoring (in terms of deleting PGCs).

Regards

[zacoz]

blu, can you be a little more specific on what you are doing when you say "reassign the cells that belong to the unwanted foreign languages to your own language" ?

[spyhawk]

Why do that? You can already "Remove LU" in PgcEdit.

[pg55555]

@hubahop

The easier way is to keep the moving menues is to use DVD Shrink to shrink the menus to the maximum, keeping the main movie to "No Compression" and then process with RB.
Of course this is preprocessing, but 99.99% of the times it should not be a problem.

For the other 0.01% you can use Shrink to verify what it would be the saving from shrinking the menu (say 50% of 700 MB=350 MB), divide this figure for 2 to convert to sectors (175,000 sectors) and add tis figure to the TargetSectors setting in rebuilder.ini : if the default is 2336000, the new figure would be 2336000+175000= 2511000.
Then process your unpreprocessed source with RB. The output will be oversized, but now you go back to the first method, now applied to the RB output: Use DVD Shrink to shrink the menu, with the movie in "No compression".

[zacoz]

Why do that? You can already "Remove LU" in PgcEdit.
I understand this spyhawk - in fact I do it myself.

My understanding however of blutach's post was that he was referring to menu pgc for multiple languages which are all within the one LU (e.g. en). I sometimes blank these with VobBlanker, and hide the other language selection buttons in audio / subtitle menu's with PgcEdit, but got the impression that blu was doing something different.

[blutach]

Suppose there was only one defined LU, but it contained 5 different sets of menus, each in a different language (instead of the proper way of doing it by defining LUs).

Then, all you need to do is find the corresponding PGCs with the different languages and in the PGC Editor, set the cells to the VCIDs of your desired language.

Easy example:

LU1 (en)
PGC 1 - 1 minute - VCID 1/1 (English, say)
PGC 2 - 1 minute - VCID 2/1 (Spanish)
PGC 3 - 1 minute - VCID 3/1 (Italian)
PGC 4 - 1 minute - VCID 4/1 (French)
PGC 5 - 1 minute - VCID 5/1 (Dutch)
In PGCs 2-5, change the VCIDs to 1/1. OK and save. Now VCID 2/1 to 5/1 are unreferenced and can be removed with VobBlanker. Savings 4 minutes of video. Multiply this for chapter menus, audio and subtitle menus and get big savings for no work.


Regards

[zacoz]

Cool...just tried it out - brilliant. :thanks: