1.07 -- First experiences with menu encoding

[Rippraff]

Hi,

first of all I'm really thankful that menu encoding is implemented now. Great job, Jerry! :)
I made a first movie and menu only test with Million Dollar Baby (PAL) last night and all went well, say I have audio in my menus. ;)
Unfortunately only a small part of the menu was encodet, the bigger part was left untouched.
To be more clear, VTS_01_0.VOB original 64MB (the VTS which contains also the main movie) was encodet properly, but this menu file holds only audio and chapter selection, where VIDEO_TS.VOB (original size 178MB) contains the rest and was left untouched.

Also I was a little bit surprised about the reduction size. It was 73%, where the main movie was about 55% (before blanking of course).
[02:20:38] Phase I, PREPARATION started.
- CCE 2.70.2.4 encoder selected.
- "CCE Adaptive Quantizer Matrices" is enabled.
- "Movie and Menus Only" mode is enabled.
- VTSM_01: 32.792 sectors.
-- Scanning and writing .D2V & .AVS files
-- Processed 1.883 frames.
-- Building .AVS and .ECL files
- VTS_01: 3.371.365 sectors.
-- Scanning and writing .D2V & .AVS files
-- Embedded null records found
-- Processed 190.921 frames.
-- Building .AVS and .ECL files
- VTS_03: 51.584 sectors.
-- Scanning and writing .D2V & .AVS files
-- Processed 2.952 frames.
-- Building .AVS and .ECL files
- VTS_04: 61.605 sectors.
-- Scanning and writing .D2V & .AVS files
-- Processed 3.602 frames.
-- Building .AVS and .ECL files
- VTS_05: 49.772 sectors.
-- Scanning and writing .D2V & .AVS files
-- Processed 3.027 frames.
-- Building .AVS and .ECL files
- VTS_06: 107.765 sectors.
-- Scanning and writing .D2V & .AVS files
-- Processed 6.554 frames.
-- Building .AVS and .ECL files
- VTS_07: 106.011 sectors.
-- Scanning and writing .D2V & .AVS files
-- Processed 6.404 frames.
-- Building .AVS and .ECL files
- VTS_08: 63.302 sectors.
-- Scanning and writing .D2V & .AVS files
-- Processed 3.726 frames.
-- Building .AVS and .ECL files
- VTS_09: 59.288 sectors.
-- Scanning and writing .D2V & .AVS files
-- Processed 3.481 frames.
-- Building .AVS and .ECL files
- Reduction Level for DVD-5: 55,2%
- Overall Bitrate : 3.126Kbs
- Space for Video : 3.396.448KB
- Blanking all EXTRA Segments
-- Feature before/after: 3.655 / 3.655 Kbs
[02:26:01] Phase I, PREPARATION completed in 6 minutes.

I'd suspected it to be the same as the main movie and would prefer to keep it smaller, as to my experiences even menus can be shrinked to 50 - 60% with good quality.

But hey, in my eyes this is a new milestone in RB development and maybe we could have an option in later versions to set the reduction level by hand.

Cu Rippraff

[jdobbs]

Hmmm... currently the VIDEO_TS.VOB isn't processed. I'll have to look at that.

[Zeul]

be careful with the VIDEO_TS.VOB as more often than not the VIDEO_TS.VOB files contains a LOT of unreferenced material or just a long black video - all used as padding - :devil: no point in re-encoding those cells. They need replacing by a still.
Whilst working on NuMenu i often came across VIDEO_TS.VOB that were upto 800MB in size and was all unreferenced material - after processing these were reduced to 18KB :D - and yes thats KB.

[jdobbs]

I can understand the padding... because of the possibility of IFO and BUP files both failing due to the same "scratch".... but that only takes a 32k pad. I think this is just another case of someone adding garbage to make it harder to make a good backup or to ensure the disc size gets pushed into the second layer.

[Rippraff]

I agree with you Zeul that VIDEO_TS.VOB often contains rubbish (unreferenced and/or referenced) but in this case you should have the opportunity by blanking it with Video Segment Editor. As jdobbs said at the moment it doesn't appear in the editor because it isn't processed and therefore it's still in the backup.

I think this is just another case of someone adding garbage to make it harder to make a good backup or to ensure the disc size gets pushed into the second layer.
Right, too. I've posted before about Madagascar (PAL) where VTS_5 contains 747 MB of black film.

Cu Rippraff

[roux]

I've also seen a number of discs with menu's in VMG vob file, which is a very ugly way of authoring.

[wmansir]

I've seen several older movies where none menu video was put in VIDEO_TS.VOB, such as trailers. I haven't seen it on more recently authored discs, but early generation DVDs. Usually classic movies too, I have a feeling it was standard practice for Warner Brothers or some other studio when they put out movies from their library. I associate it with snapper cases, which is why I assume Warner. Now that I think about it they were mostly, if not exclusively, DVD5, so it's not really an issue.

EDIT:

Oh, and I did a menu reencode. Haven't tested it on a machine, but everything looks good on my computer.

It wasn't a clean re-encode either as I had 'still'ed some of the video with VOBBlanker. Original menu size was 800MB, got it down to 225 by stilling mostly background video and keeping all transitions. DVD-RB reencoded that down to 140MB and it looks great. I also want to test this disc because it's the first one I've done with field based encoding in ProCoder.

[yogi_]

I had my first menu encoding experience today. I'm really glad about this new feature. What I didn't like was that DVD-RB used my additional filters from the AVS Filter Editor for the menu encoding as well. I think this is not very useful. In most of the cases you will need different filters for the menu if you want to use any filters on the menu at all.

Besides that everything worked fine for me.

[jdobbs]

For the next version I'll not apply filters to the menus...