Lord Of Rings With TRUE 5.1 Surround

[Xenobyte99]

Actually this may not be on topic but i have gotten a hold of the original VOBs from the lord of the rings dvd. It has full functional 5.1 sound . If anyoen is interested in helping me make a dvd project with it let me know.

[GlenC]

If you have the original vobs, why do you need a dvd project?

Glen.

[peterb]

I've made a lotr project with the 5.1 ac-3 sound from 3 divx-files. Very good quality in the sound, so I suspect this is equal to the quality that are in those VOBS. Since you have the VOBS what is it that you need help with ? Are the VOBS only video and you want to make menus etc? In that case just ask and I'll try to help you.

[Xenobyte99]

I want to know whats the best way to do menus

[peterb]

The best way to do menus and author a new dvd with them depends a lot on exactly what kind of menus and dvd you want to author as well as what kind of source you start with. I haven't seen the VOBS you have so I don't know exactly what they contain NTSC/PAL/audiostreams/subtitles/menus etc and you haven't told anything more specific of what you want to do so It's a little bit hard to give specific advice. The general steps involved would be:

1) demux (split) the vobs into elemetary streams (separate video/audio etc) and decide which of these streams you want/need to use. Tools to do this can be easily found on the download section of doom9.
2) create aditional sources that you need. This could be background images, menu soundtracks, extras such as trailers etc. A lot of useful tools for this could also be found on the dowload section, in addition to these a good graphics package is useful.
3) import all the sources into a dvd-authoring program author the menus, chapters etc and compile the dvd and test it and the burn it to DVD. There is no free dvd-authoring programs that I know of. You might have gotten one with your dvd-burner but it will likely be a simple one without support for multichannel audio which you clearly need. The following are some programs that might do the trick for you.

Pinnacle Impression DVD PRO - is the cheapest authoring program with support for multichannel audio that I'm aware of. I haven't tested it myself but from the specs it looks good. Price around $500
SpruceUP - no longer sold since Spruce was bought up by Apple. Demo version can still be downloaded I think. Very simple to use. Price was around $129
Sonic High end packages. These include Scenarist, ReelDVD, DVDFusion. I havent used any of these but from the specs and what I've heard they are quite complicated to use. Prices are in the range $1500 to $22000 so these are clealy not targetting the home market.
Spruce DVDMaestro is a very advanced but yet easy to use package that is easy to learn if you have a basic understanding of how a dvd is structured. You can do a lot with this package but I don't know if it's still being sold. I've heard prices form $12000 to $25000 for this sw so it's not targetting the home market either, but it's easy enough to be used by most home users. There are also two simpler programs from spruce DVDConductor ca $3995 and DVDVirtuoso ca $995 that both probably would be ok for you but these I haven't used.

Programs that would not work for you include. Sonic MyDVD, Sonic DVDIT, ULead DVD Movie Factory, Pinnacle Impression DVD SE and Roxio VideoPack 5. None of these support multichannel audio so you don't even need to spend time and money to test them.

To get a idea of how you could do this I suggest you read the new DVDMAestro guide http://www.doom9.org/mpg/maestro.htm

I could share some of my menus etc with you and help you if you need additonal help. But you should be aware that my project is authored for PAL so it would require some work to use in a similar NTSC project. Menus are different size, chapter points are not on the same times etc. If you need help send me an email. I left my email adress in a private message to you.

BTW: you should also read this thread: http://forum.doom9.org/showthread.php?s=&threadid=15136&highlight=LOTR
it contains alot of info on authoring a lotr dvd as well as some realyy nice menu images.