DVD Rebuilder - Compatibility with Extended Filesets

[Wombler]

Following on from this thread (http://forum.doom9.org/showthread.php?p=1169476#post1169476) and in particular Blutach's very informative post, I've been doing some work recently for evdberg in relation to adding an option to DVD2One to produce these extended filesets.

As far as we are aware DVD2One is now the only program with a dedicated option to produce these extended filesets and the primary purpose of this from my perspective was to enable users to recompress large two disc films in DVD-RB with the encoder of their choice.

Unfortunately although these extended titlesets are within the DVD specs (according to mpucoder) it seems after testing here that DVD-RB has difficulties in compressing them.

The exact details of this though I won't bore everyone with unless this goes any further or anyone would like me to elaborate.

Despite the problems Evdberg was happy however to add the options to the latest release (v2.3.0) on the basis that there are several other benefits but it would be nice to get DVD-RB cooperating with these extended filesets to ultimately be able produce higher quality versions of very long movies with ease.

I'm not quite sure where we go on this from here but I suppose really I'm putting this forward as a suggestion to jdobbs as an improvement to DVD-RB that I suspect would be both a useful enhancement and likely to be fairly easily implemented.

Any thoughts on this?


Wombler

[jdobbs]

Show me where the DVD spec allows "extended filesets". I read the thread, and I don't see where mpucoder said they are. If he did I'd definitely listen, as he's probably the smartest guy around on DVD standards.

Also, I'm not clear exactly what you are asking me to do? Do you want DVD-RB to be able to read a large VTS?

[blutach]

@jdobbs - see the last paragraph here (http://www.mpucoder.com/DVD/vobov.html) where mpucoder makes that quote.

EDIT: Actually, my understanding of the whole 8.3 and 1Gb convention was that it was to be compatible with Windows95 systems. Standalones uses UDF 1.02 (or perhaps UDF 1.02 together with ISO9660), which can happily read files of greater than 1Gb. Anyway, if the user is going to compress the disk to DVD-9 or DVD-5 anyway, I doubt the input matters all that much in terms of filesize.

Do you want DVD-RB to be able to read a large VTS?
I think that is exactly what Wombler wants.

Regards

[Wombler]

Show me where the DVD spec allows "extended filesets". I read the thread, and I don't see where mpucoder said they are. If he did I'd definitely listen, as he's probably the smartest guy around on DVD standards.

Also, I'm not clear exactly what you are asking me to do? Do you want DVD-RB to be able to read a large VTS?

Sorry, I could have phrased that better.

According to Blutach's post (the one I linked to above) mpucoder has stated that the normal 1GB size of a VOB is purely for the convenience of certain operating systems.

Or in other words it should be possible to produce an interim seamlessly joined fileset with an oversize VOB 9 for the purposes of re-encoding very large films to a single DVD-5.

Evdberg has added the option to create these extended filesets to DVD2One and I've been testing joined versions of the LOTR Two Towers Extended Edition with various media players.

I chose this particular film as I'm aware that others had experienced difficulties in combining the discs to produce a single disc DVD-5 version since the limit on the number VOBs means it's impossible to create a standard 1GB VOB joined fileset (it's over 9GB in total).

DVD2One now creates these extended filesets and will happily process and compress one of them but it's only transcoding and not carrying out a full re-encode.

DVD-RB appears to process the extended fileset as normal and finishes without any error but for some reason, I haven't been able to determine, appears to ignore the video content past chapter 42 of the combined titleset (chapters 42-68 of the DVD-RB output are empty and the VOBU entry sectors & start and end points haven't carried through).

BTW I've no idea why chapter 42 is significant as the seamless join is at chapter 31, the start of the extended VOB 9 is not long into chapter 53 and the layer break for the second disc would equate to chapter 46 in the combined titleset.

Anyway, if possible I'd like DVD-RB to be able to compress this temporary oversize fileset to a normal DVD-5 in a similar fashion to DVD2One.

My apologies if I'm still not explaining this clearly enough and I'm grateful for your patience in this regard (and the very prompt response :cool:) but if there's anything I haven't fully clarified please ask as I'd be more than glad to explain.

:thanks:


Wombler

[Wombler]

@jdobbs - see the last paragraph here (http://www.mpucoder.com/DVD/vobov.html) where mpucoder makes that quote.

Regards

Thanks Les.

I wasn't sure where you'd got that from and it took me that long composing my response above that I missed your post. :)




EDIT: Actually, my understanding of the whole 8.3 and 1Gb convention was that it was to be compatible with Windows95 systems. Standalones uses UDF 1.02 (or perhaps UDF 1.02 together with ISO9660), which can happily read files of greater than 1Gb. Anyway, if the user is going to compress the disk to DVD-9 or DVD-5 anyway, I doubt the input matters all that much in terms of filesize.

Regards

That was my understanding as well and in the context of ripping the 1GB file size was also imposed to cope with an inherent limit of the FAT32 filing system, which doesn't apply to modern NTFS formatted hard discs.


I think that is exactly what Wombler wants.

Regards

Yeah that's sort of what I'd like but just to be clear DVD-RB already seems to read the files okay but doesn't actually process them correctly.

So what I'd like is for DVD-RB to be capable of processing these extended filesets correctly.

As I've said above the point at which is fails to cope seems illogical and evdberg is very certain that his extended structure is compliant.

So we were unable to determine exactly what the problem was.

Now that the DVD2One testing is complete I've got the go ahead from evdberg to discuss any of this as his end of things appears to have been taken to its logical conclusion.


Wombler

[ron spencer]

I hope jdobbs can as well....this could be a VERY useful feature.....


hopefully he will consider it.

-rs

[Wombler]

I hope jdobbs can as well....this could be a VERY useful feature.....


hopefully he will consider it.

-rs

Jdobbs is exceptionally good that way and anything he considers worthwhile is usually added in.

Whether he considers it a useful feature or not is another matter and we don't know the answer to this yet (I assume he's tied up with the BD Rebuilder project at the moment).

My own gut feeling is that it would be a useful enhancement to the program and would probably be fairly simple to implement but no doubt Jdobbs will let us know his own thoughts on this when he has a chance.


Wombler

[ron spencer]

he most certainly is....been thinking about doing my LOTR EE DVDs onto one dual layer....no real hurry of course....

As I think about it, this feature, along with the new BR thing he is working on, is something cool on the software scene.


So thanks to him.....

[blutach]

Given the BD to DVD involves "extended titlesets" (well, in a fashion), it might not be a big deal to code this.

Regards

[ron spencer]

that is a good point....never thought about that....

[jdobbs]

Have you ever tried to burn an "extended titleset" on a standalone player? Preferably one that is strict to standards, like Sony. That would be the real test as to whether it is outside what is expected to be kept.

But what you are asking for isn't really for DVD-RB to write anything like that -- which is where I'd say "No" -- but the ability to read.

Wouldn't it make more sense for DVD-RB to simply take the two discs and make them one (I assume as a movie-only encode), than what you're asking? That'd save the step of creating a questionable disc anyway...

[blutach]

@jdobbs

Once you make them one, that's when the extended fileset comes in (as the merged discs are bigger than 9Gb). I guess the idea is to encode it as a single project as opposed to devoting say 2.18Gb to each disc in the merged project (since the optimum might turn out to be 2.00Gb for disc 1 and 2.36Gb for disc 2).

Regards

[jdobbs]

I was thinking you could force a couple of big VTSs by taking the right combination of two DVD-5s.. hmmm... maybe not. I guess I could do it by hand or make a test version of DVD-RB that would do it.

I still think it would make more sense just to select two different sources and let DVD-RB do the join.

[ron spencer]

yes...I think what people would like is to use DVD2One to make 100% quality join, of say, LOTR EE, with the massive final VOB....then run through DVD-RB to make 100% compliant dvd.

Having DVD-RB do the join (seamless one would hope) could also work....in any case nice feature overall.

[ron spencer]

I had actually done something like this with TMPGEnc's old DVD Author, but it was too many steps....it too would not let you make endless VOBs via joining....it worked, but the number of steps was too much

[Wombler]

I was thinking you could force a couple of big VTSs by taking the right combination of two DVD-5s.. hmmm... maybe not. I guess I could do it by hand or make a test version of DVD-RB that would do it.

I still think it would make more sense just to select two different sources and let DVD-RB do the join.

I can send you the IFOs etc. of the extended fileset or any other stuff you may need if that's of any help?

Edit: On second thoughts and for the avoidance of doubt I'd better clarify that the IFOs I refer to are not the copyrighted ones from the original DVDs but are those generated for the extended fileset.


Wombler