Stealing Animated Menus

[p3distxii]

Am I allowed to ask this?:)

I am working on Blade 2 right now. I would like to take the chapter selection menus out of the VTS_01_0.VOB and put them in scenarist and edit the menus so they allow only scene selection and remove all other links. I am unable to import the VTS_01_0.VOB into scenarist so I'm kinda stuck. Can this be done with Maestro? I have put off learning menus for too long. All of the guides teach you how to make your own menus, but I would like to use the original ones from the dvd. Any help would be appreciated.

[Navellint]

I believe vobrator (among others) can extract all separate parts of a menu from a vob. You can then put them back together in your authoring program. Needless to say (i guess) that you cannot import .vob into scenarist or maestro as it is muxed data. I haven't really started to work with vobrator, but i've seen it's a rather slow program. It uses Scenarist's logos for streams though, so it looks compatible (for all that's worth).
You can also make screenshots of still-menus and recreate the subpicture and hot spots (overlay) yourself. I really think you should learn menus: it will take a day for the first one, but it is far more rewarding than learning how to mutilate existing menus with ifo-edit or something.

[pale]

I find the easiest way to recreate animated menu is to use VobEdit to demux menu vob (demux by id). Next, extract the m2v from each vob-id (obviously you'll only have to do this for those sequences you'll want to use). After these steps you should have each videosequence as individual m2v's as a result (same methos is used to demux audio). Then you can rip the subpictures with Subrip. Then you are ready to import those assets to Maestro and recreate your menu.

[mrsam]

Use Vobrator for the demux. It gives you d2v and ac3 streams for each individual ID in the VOB. Once it is done all your resources should be there for you to choose from.

I have used Vobrator and don't think it's too slow. It takes about 40 sec to load and scan a 1Gb VOB and about 5 min. to demux into streams. The menu would be much faster than that.

[easy2Bcheesy]

Is it just my copy of VOBrator or does it crash whenever you try to extract data from a CSS-protected disc? I have had to use SmartRipper to rip the VOBs into CSS-free files and then go from there. I'd much rather stick to VOBrator as it's very user-friendly.

[DIggedy]

easy2Bcheesy: yes you're right VOBrator will only work on ripped files or non-css protected discs... that is why on the VOBrator splash screen it specifically says 'De-CSSed DVD'.

[Yohudi]

I posted a detailed article regarding this at the link below...

http://www.mediaforums.net/forum/viewtopic.php?t=9788

the images are not up but if you follow the steps using the utils mentioned you won't need them