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Ghitulescu
3rd May 2013, 10:39
A long story short:

I have a DVD that was a collection of episodes, chained together in a single PGC while the "Episode menu" pointed to various chapters inside this big PGC. I believe the anime lovers are familiar with this strange (!!) authoring. This authoring style also hindered the job of adding subtitles.

Now, I re-authored the DVD the way it would make more sense, and this way I discovered a potential bug.
http://oi43.tinypic.com/312y2qq.jpg
We discuss case A. The huge PGC has been kept, and each episode was given its own PGC (comprising the corresponding cells), and the menu was corrected to point to the right PGCs instead of chapter marks. The original PGC has been kept and pointed to by a PLAY ALL button.

VobBlanker has a limitation. It cannot replace a cell with a VOB referred by an IFO but only with a VOB file. This limitation is not noticed in practice until one needs to replace a cell bigger than 1GB (so it needs two or more VOB files). Like in my case. So I had to go to replace the subtitled cells at PGC level.
http://oi42.tinypic.com/xkxhtf.jpg
This image corresponds to case A above. Notice that PGC 2-7 have the size indicated as 0. Is it a bug or a feature (because the cells are reused, and therefore do not claim additional space), I don't know. But this is not the issue.
http://oi41.tinypic.com/3163xwp.jpg
And I got this error message. VobBlanker cannot find one cell of the newly created PGC. See that the number of cells is 0 (third line from bottom).

Workaround.
The solution I found to circumvent this was to place the PLAY ALL PGC (the original one) at the end of the list, and all the new created PGCs before it. See case B in figure 1 above. It works as it should be.

Workaround 2.
Never tested it myself, but I theoretically think that if one joins the VOBs into a single (over 1GB) VOB (with eg VobMerge), he could use the replace cells command as well. But this will work of course only if one needs to replace cells and not episodes.

My Explanation
It may be that VobBlanker cannot replace the second or any subsequent instance of a cell, one probably must replace a cell during its very first instance.

I couldn't find this situation described anywhere, so I decided to post it here. Hope it helps others as well.

TheSkiller
3rd May 2013, 16:28
Thanks for the hint.

I remember last time I was using VobBlanker I had to use VOBMerge to create one big VOB from the VOBs created my MuxMan.
However my case wasn't as complicated as yours since I just needed to replace all the cells of the movie with the new ones. And all that work only because the stock subtitles looked like crap (Arial, blocky, no 16:9 correction – simply awful). :rolleyes:

r0lZ
3rd May 2013, 23:27
I have never noticed the 1GB limitation, but the fact that a reused cell is handled by VB only in its first instance is known. IMO, jsoto did it that way, as you cannot replace a single instance only. If you replace a cell, you replace all instances. So, it makes sense to show the cell only once in the GUI.

Ghitulescu
7th May 2013, 06:14
... but the fact that a reused cell is handled by VB only in its first instance is known.
Well, I couldn't find any indication of this.
IMO, jsoto did it that way, as you cannot replace a single instance only. If you replace a cell, you replace all instances. So, it makes sense to show the cell only once in the GUI.
Since the second and further instances of a cell refer back to its first appearance, replacing the n-th instance could simply replace the content of the first instance.
Sometimes, in inflated menus, the same cells are reused on and on and this makes the editing look more like forensics rather than authoring. :)