Xin1generator: Create Ordered Chapter mkv's from Seamless Branching BluRay's

[Mosu]

mmg/mkvmerge do not care about the file extension. The only place it's a tiny bit relevant is the file dialogs because they default to a list of most-often used file extensions to display -- but you can always chose "all files". You could even remove the file extension completely.

There's only one exception and that is VobSubs because they consist of two files.

[Lincoln Burrows]

Folks, do you know the name of any similar tool, but for DVDs?

I have a title with the R-Rated Theatrical and Unrated versions, so it's using seamless branching as well.

[Lincoln Burrows]

I am having a problem with Stargate (1994). I analysed the Blu-ray and created a Matroska (using MKVToolnix) with both Theatrical (2h) and Extended (2h09) versions.

However, after I did all this procedure, I decided to insert a MP3 audio track (with the same length as the Extended version).

This is the error I am getting here: the first 2 minutes are being cut when I select the Extended Version, and if I select the Theatrical one, nothing is cut.

What is wrong with this picture? Should I edit something else here? Perhaps the tags file?

I want this MP3 to be functional and for the Extended version only.

P.S. I didn't had this problem with the Blu-ray from the movie Once Upon a Time in the West (1968). I have no idea what went wrong this time.

[DVD]

Hello everyone,

While watching a seamless branching Blu-Ray I started thinking about bringing this into a MKV file and stumbled across this post on my journey to make it work.

Let my try to explain what I did. Maybe you can help me to find our what went wrong.

Also, I am not looking to house two different cuts of a movie (e.g. standard cut vs. director's cut) in a MKV file, but actually different languages (german version vs. english version).

On my BD it looks like this

I have two playlists with the move (one is the English version, one is the German version), e.g.

0001.MPLS (eng)
-> 00001.M2TS
-> 00002.M2TS
-> 00003.M2TS
-> 00004.M2TS
...
-> 00010.M2TS

and

0002.MPLS (deu)
-> 00001.M2TS
-> 00011.M2TS
-> 00003.M2TS
-> 00012.M2TS
...
-> 00010.M2TS

As you can see, the movie branches back and forth between the different segments, depending on what playlist is used.

Now I took this approach: I created two full MKV files (one with the german version, one with english version using MakeMKV). I then used MKVToolNix (mkvmerge) to split the two versions into segments. I used the exact time codes from the MPLS files to cut/split. I ended up with the following files (each MKV file theoretical matching the corresponding M2TS file):

-> 00001.MKV
-> 00002.MKV
-> 00003.MKV
-> 00004.MKV
...
-> 00010.MKV
-> 00011.MKV
-> 00012.MKV

I then concatenated everything into one big file (00001.MKV->00010.MKV [full movie, first language] + 00011.MKV + 00012.MKV [missing segments for the second language]) and used Editions to create the chapters for the two different versions of the movie.

Unfortunately, the results are not ideal: The MKV files are usually a few milliseconds longer in duration than the MPLS files suggest for each playitem. As a result this error adds up: The german segments appended to the end of the english movie in total have a ~0.5 seconds longer duration than they should have as per the total play item sum from the MPLS. This causes the chapter time codes and the "actual" segment time codes to disperse.
This means, that at the end of the movie the branching is no longer seamless and the player "jumps" to a slightly off timeframe, causing a couple of frames to repeat.

Now my questions: What am I doing wrong? What could I do better?

I checked a sample segment's MKV file and while the last frame's timing (video track) seems to match the expected length perfectly, the MKV still seems to be a little to long ...

Also, I took a look at chapterEditor. It looks like it takes a similar approach, which is to append the "missing" segments from one version to the end of the other version.

[hubblec4]

...Now my questions: What am I doing wrong?
Only chapterEditor can handle such BDs correctly, but also chapterEditor needs prepared audio streams. This means you have to extract the audio streams where all m2ts files are used which belongs to both movie versions. Because in the audio streams are identical frames which have to skipped.
All this can be done in cE with few clicks.

Your work chain: generate two mkv's and extract segments and then merge all segments is a bad idea because cutting is in general not a solution which will 100% work.


What could I do better?

...
Also, I took a look at chapterEditor. It looks like it takes a similar approach, which is to append the "missing" segments from one version to the end of the other version.

Yeah, use chapterEditor. For more helping please use the chapterEditor thread.

[DVD]

Hello guys,

Thanks for the feedback. I now tried chapterEditor to create a version of that movie. Turns out the result is even worse than my manual approach. The skips and jumps at the branching points got significantly worse, several seconds now at the end of the movie instead of just half a second in my "manual" file. My assumption is that the time codes that are maintained in the play items of the MPLS file do not match the timecode that end up in the MKV based on the individual M2TS file's video/audio contents.

I will now try to convert the M2TS files one by one into MKV to get the exact timings/durations so I can set/correct the branch points accordingly. Let' see if that works.

[DVD]

Okay, I played around a little with the individual M2TS files and converted the first few to MKV files. Looks like the result is quite different from the timeing the play items in the MPLS would suggest. It seems to be of by 1/10 second but with 54 M2TS files that adds up to a noticable difference.