Parse IFO for Unreferenced Cells

[ZuZu]

I'm suprised no one else has thought of this. You can parse the ifo for all unreferenced cells then create a PSL file which should be relatively fast.

[setarip_old]

I believe that's what the "PS PlugIn" (for "PGCEdit") by "MadMonk" does...

[ZuZu]

a stand alone program would be better

[ron spencer]

then you have to pay for AnyDVD

[r0lZ]

AnyDVD doesn't remove the unreferenced cells. As far as I know, only ther PSL plugin can do that.

@ZuZu: if you want a standalone program to do it, write it! You're welcome!

[ron spencer]

u are right rolz....just tried it....still there, VOB blanker then will work.

[jsoto]

Don't forget there are protected cells which are referenced material.

[ZuZu]

@ZuZu: if you want a standalone program to do it, write it! You're welcome!

I've been thinking about it, don't know much about parsing IFOs but could you tell me where the info for unreferenced cells are in the IFO ?

[Drinken]

Well as the material is unreferenced I would think there's no info in the IFO... :)

[r0lZ]

Well, there are two kind of unreferenced cells.

The true unreferenced cells are cells present in the VOBs but w/o any reference in the IFOs. Such cells are removed by FixVTS or VobBlanker, and are not used by ARccOS.

For the ARccOS protection, you need to know if a PGC is played or not. If it is never played, the PGC can be destroyed (though you have to update a lot of tables.) If it is played, you have to analyse the VM commands to see if there are cells that are always skipped, by means of cell commands. Such a cell can be deleted, but again, you must take care of the cell flags of the remaining cells, fix the PGC total time, etc...
When this job is done on all PGCs of the DVD, the cells that are still in the VOBs but never referenced in the IFOs can be deleted in the VOBs. Again, you should do it with care, and fix various things in the remaining cells.

The PSL plugin removes also some cells that are originally played, but are only small black frames, used so that the post command can be called to jump to the real start of the PGC. Though not absolutely necessary, removing them is a good point of the plugin.

The other programs (DVD Decrypter, DVDFab Decrypter, AnyDVD, etc...) are only able to replace the cells with read errors with dummy, empty sectors. This cause many problems with programs such as DVD Shrink.

As you can see, it's not easy.