What is ReAuthorist?

[aquabubble]

Some of you might be thinking what this ReAuthorist tool is that's being talked about. Well, here I am to fill you in on a few details.

Well, ReAuthorist is the new name for doItFaster4Me and is designed to take the effort out of CCE/Scenarist projects. It combines the functionality of several tools that are currently needed into one neat package, and adds a whole raft of new features that are available nowhere else. It's come on a very long way since the early alpha that was released in January. It still has some more to go before I am ready to release it, but the basic functionality is now there.

Following a rip from DoItFast4U, ReAuthorist performs all of the manual steps that you'd normally undertake to put all the pieces back together again. Not only this, but the first public release will see an interactive interface to let you adjust the amount of compression to use on your different VTSs, showing you in real time what your new DVD size will be - kiss goodbye to your bitrate heartaches! In addition, it will also let you choose which audio and subpicture streams to keep, tracking your new DVD size as it goes.

This first public release will be able to be used with a great many titles, but restricted to PGC-rips only. However, that should be the only major initial restriction. With enough positive feedback I will move on to vobid and cellid ripped projects.

For more information for where I am up to, please feel free to look at my changelog.

[fourtyfour]

servus...

Hy aquabubble.


This first public release will be able to be used with a great many titles, but restricted to PGC-rips only.

Release Date? :)

I´ve read about two weeks, that´s true?

[aquabubble]

I hope so, but as ever it depends on workload/free time. I'm putting in virtually every free minute I can spare to develop it though. Keep your eyes open in this forum for updates.

[fourtyfour]

servus...

Hy aquabubble.

I´m very interested with your tool and how it works.

I can make Audio,subtitle, *.avs with DIF4U.

So how do you use these to get ready in Scenarist?

I mean, the audio have a small delay.
Do you fix that delay?

In your changelog is something to read about ecl for CCE.
Do you use EClCCE for support newer versions of CCE?

Can ReAuthorist handle with Button over Video like Matrix "follow the rabbit"?

How do you handle these all together to import in Scenarist?
Do you use "new from script" for import everything?

BTW: if you need more beta-tester for your tool, let me know. ;)

[aquabubble]

Hi fortyfour,

It analyses all of the demuxed files, AC3, DTS, D2V/M2V etc to identify their attributes, such as duration, bitrate and number of channels - basically, all of the information that Scenarist needs to know about your different assets. If there is any information missing (as in the case of missing audio streams), then it fills in the blanks.

Audio delays should, for the most part, be handled automatically by Scenarist so no alteration of the AC3 is needed. However, I am aware of a problem with some PAL titles, but until a proper workaround can be found I will not implement this into ReAuthorist. Personally, I think there may be a bug in DVD2AVI/mpeg2dec that is causing some frames to go missing. You see if everything worked as expected, no alteration of any of the demuxed files should be needed.

At the moment my ECL only supports version 2.5 of CCE. If someone could give me an example of an ECL from a later version then I will look into implementing this. As an alternative - and this may be the preferred way of doing things - the soon to be released version of ReAuthorist will also create a file compatible with DoCCE4U.

ReAuthorist will recreate your subpicture streams for things like button over video, but in order to get this working IFOUpdate has to do its job properly.

Yes, the file generated by ReAuthorist is a SCP script file so it is imported by using the "New from script" feature - thanks Sonic! :)

If you would like to help beta test, pm me your email address and I'll include you on the distribution list.

[Mikel]

To my knowledge, there is no fully working trial version of CCE above 2.5 available. That's why most people are still sticking to that old version. All versions 2.6 and above have no saving code included.


To automate things, ecl files are really neat. That's the only reason I still use version 2.5. I use an advanced editor (like UltraEdit) to change all the settings i need in the batch-file. This saves quite some time.

Aquabubble: I am really looking forward for your tool. I was thinking about coding something like this myself, but not in C.

Anyway I hope you can release your first beta soon.

Cheers

Mikel

[fourtyfour]

servus...

PM is out.

2.64 Versions works very well.

For 2.66 and 2.67 there is a solution called EclCCE.

It works also very well.

Maybe we can find a way to include EclCCE to import Ecl in CCE.

But first I have to test the beta :D

[Mikel]

ECLCEE, is that some kind of tool? Never heard of before.

What is PM?

Thanks for your help

Cheers

Mikel

[fourtyfour]

servus...

PM= private message (for aquabubble)

For EclCCE use the search button in this forum.

[Mikel]

Thanks for your help regarding ELCCee. I just downloaded it and it was just what i was looking for.

Great

Cheers

Mikel

[mikeathome]

aquabubble, fourtyfour you got PN.
I would like to share CCESP 2.66 automation and missing frames correction with you...

mike

[Shamanis]

Aquabubble,

As per subject, I've also noticed this. Adding up all the frames in a multi-pgc title and then comparing to the number of frames in CCE seems to drop about 15 or so. This causes the video to be about 1 seccond shorter, and leads to duration mismatch in IFOupdate. No serious problem as long as there wasn't a chapter point on that end (which sometimes there is). I'm going to try and manually add those 15 (or whatever) frames to CCE ECL file and see if it encodes correctly, or dumps the CCE Error message into tresulting MPV file.

EDIT: Just tried a file that had dropped 4 frames. Added the 4 frames to the ECL and can't see any error message etc. anyone else wanna try and confirm?

[aquabubble]

shamanis: it's a really annoying problem! I'm not sure that adding frames to the ECL is the way to avoid it, since the mpeg2dec plugin reads the d2v file to find out where the frames are in the m2v. I know from my testing that adding a few frames does not result in error, but adding say 100, does. Also, my tests happened to be with video clips that had frames of black at the end, so couldn't tell whether any "real" frames were being added - what did your test reveal?

Besides, my belief is that frames may be being lost from the beginning as well as the end (and possibly mid-way through as well).

[mikeathome]

Originally posted by Shamanis
Aquabubble,

As per subject, I've also noticed this. Adding up all the frames in a multi-pgc title and then comparing to the number of frames in CCE seems to drop about 15 or so. This causes the video to be about 1 seccond shorter, and leads to duration mismatch in IFOupdate. No serious problem as long as there wasn't a chapter point on that end (which sometimes there is). I'm going to try and manually add those 15 (or whatever) frames to CCE ECL file and see if it encodes correctly, or dumps the CCE Error message into tresulting MPV file.

EDIT: Just tried a file that had dropped 4 frames. Added the 4 frames to the ECL and can't see any error message etc. anyone else wanna try and confirm?

Hi,

you need to patch (add the frames in the .d2v) Add a '2' for every missed frame. Don't forget the '9' at the end. I automated this process incl. the count of the missed frame. Mail me, I'll send you the solution.

mike

[hakko504]

Originally posted by aquabubble
shamanis: it's a really annoying problem! I'm not sure that adding frames to the ECL is the way to avoid it, since the mpeg2dec plugin reads the d2v file to find out where the frames are in the m2v. I know from my testing that adding a few frames does not result in error, but adding say 100, does. Also, my tests happened to be with video clips that had frames of black at the end, so couldn't tell whether any "real" frames were being added - what did your test reveal?

Besides, my belief is that frames may be being lost from the beginning as well as the end (and possibly mid-way through as well). Frames are indeed lost from the beginning if the vob doesn't start with an I-frame.
Unless you have an faulty stream, frames should not be lost in the middle.
And as have been pointed out, sometimes frames are lost from the end. I'm not sure why, but I have a feeling it might be that the last frames are marked as dropped in order to close a GOP, and that DVD2AVI doesn't recognize this, but simply skips those frames when it creates the .d2v, making it a little shorter than it should be.

[mikeathome]

Originally posted by hakko504
Frames are indeed lost from the beginning if the vob doesn't start with an I-frame.
Unless you have an faulty stream, frames should not be lost in the middle.
And as have been pointed out, sometimes frames are lost from the end. I'm not sure why, but I have a feeling it might be that the last frames are marked as dropped in order to close a GOP, and that DVD2AVI doesn't recognize this, but simply skips those frames when it creates the .d2v, making it a little shorter than it should be.

Hi,

this matches exactly my investigations. I did an indeep framecount at the beginning at the end of a vob (choosed a small from a split by VobID) and found, that in 99% of the cases when you split at VobID you'll loose frames (1-5) at the end. Indeed, this might be due to 'artificial' closed GOPs which are necessary at VobID/CellID border. Since a VobID needs to start with an I-Frame I found this not to be an issue.

mike

[aquabubble]

Originally posted by hakko504
Frames are indeed lost from the beginning if the vob doesn't start with an I-frame.

Agreed. In what circumstances would a VOB not begin with an I-frame? Remember that we are dealing with demuxed M2Vs (one big one normally), not that it should make any difference.


And as have been pointed out, sometimes frames are lost from the end. I'm not sure why, but I have a feeling it might be that the last frames are marked as dropped in order to close a GOP, and that DVD2AVI doesn't recognize this, but simply skips those frames when it creates the .d2v, making it a little shorter than it should be.

Interesting... what do you mean by "marked as dropped"? I wish I had the time to delve deep into DVD2AVI to look into correcting this!

[aquabubble]

Originally posted by mikeathome
you need to patch (add the frames in the .d2v) Add a '2' for every missed frame. Don't forget the '9' at the end. I automated this process incl. the count of the missed frame. Mail me, I'll send you the solution.

Hi mikeathome,

I had a look at the solution you sent me - thanks for that, it looks interesting. However, one thing that I find most intriguing in all of this is that the virtualdubmod for mpeg2 is based on DVD2AVI, yet it gets the frame count right! Now if we can work out what it's doing differently...

[hakko504]

Originally posted by aquabubble
Interesting... what do you mean by "marked as dropped"? I wish I had the time to delve deep into DVD2AVI to look into correcting this! Instead of encoding a black frame, It is possible to set frametype to Z, instead of IPB. This is equivalent to a dropped frame - it's a frame of size Zero.

And if you use FAT(32) there is a lot of reasons why a vob wouldn't start with an I-frame. ;) But you are right - when dealing with vobs there is very few occasions where the vob won't start with an I-frame. I can't really think of any, as long as all cuts are made at cell boundaries.
Some versions of DVD2AVI can handle transportstreams as well, and those almost never start with an I-frame, but that's a different thing.

[aquabubble]

Originally posted by hakko504
Instead of encoding a black frame, It is possible to set frametype to Z, instead of IPB. This is equivalent to a dropped frame - it's a frame of size Zero.

Just been looking into this to see if it would be possible to find out where/how many dropped frames there would be. According to my documentation (dating back to 1995), the picture_coding_type is a three bit value:

000 - forbidden
001 - intra-coded (I)
010 - predictive-coded (P)
011 - bidirectionally-predictive-coded (B)
100 - shall not be used (dc intra-coded (D) in ISO/IEC11172-2)
101 - reserved
110 - reserved
111 - reserved

Hmmm... which one would be Z?

(we are seriously off-topic here - should we take this to the DVD2AVI forum?)

[Eyes`Only]

Everyone,

We're constantly on the lookout for a viable solution to add to our apps to fix the vobid demux. I'm also aware that the subtitle vobid demux doesn't work right and I'm working on resolving that too.

In addition, I've talked with Light_UK, to see if the problem can be resolved by having him make DVD Decrypter write the .m2vs differently. If anyone has suggestions on how he could do this, he's ready to listen. We realize this is a big issue and as soon as a viable solution can be found it will be implemented. Personally, I'm looking at fixing it from the DVDDEC side, if possible, since that seems to be where the problem stems from.

[hakko504]

@aquabubble

I've spent the evening reading the DVD2AVI code, trying to find exactly what happens at the end of a file but I haven't been able to draw any certain conclusions - except one: if you don't have a closed gop at the end of a vobID this could lead to the last two B-frames ending up in the next .m2v! There are some mystic flags being parsed also, but I'm not sure what all of them does, and if that could be interpreted as bad frames.

And feel free to move (or copy) this thread to the DVD2AVI forum. I also think we should ask Belgabor if he knows anything about this as VirtualDubMod does deliver those last missing frames.

[digitalvideo]

Hello aquablue,


Can i have acces to your beta of ReAuthorist ?

thank's

digitalvideo@ifrance.com

[d4g]

Hi could i have access to reauthorist to give it a go and see how it works


secondly have you found a way to do vobid yet.especially when u have to enter chapters manully for those titles..

other question id like to ask why do u got through the cce method in your program when docce does al of that....doesnt your program just look at all the assets and implements them to a scenarist script for importing.....

if im wrong please let me know....


Denis

d4g@iprimus.com.au

[aquabubble]

Hi d4g,

Sorry for taking so long to respond - I've been busy working on the next beta. Sure, I'll include you on the distribution list. Things are taking a major leap forward with this release, so I'd prefer you to have this next version rather than the current one - it will only be a wait of a few days. I hope you don't mind.

As for vobid projects, well yes, I have this planned out in my head, but I want to get the PGC rip functionality 100% first. We'll see how this goes.

ReAuthorist started development before DoCCE4U was available, hence it's own ECL files. However, very soon (when DoCCE4U does everything that ReAuthorist does with the ECL), ReAuthorist will produce a file compatible with DoCCE4U as well.

ReAuthorist is intended to be an interactive tool for choosing which assets you want to keep for your DVD and sizing the different components to make it fit on a DVD-R. Once you have decided what to keep, ReAuthorist will generate a task list for encoding and a Scenarist script to go with it. In other words, the process flow is:

DoItFast4U--->ReAuthorist--->DoCCE4U
|
|
V
Scenarist--->IfoUpdate

[Fmazzanti]

Hi,
could I have access to this next-to-come beta release of reauthorist when it is ready? I would like to take a look at it, just to see how it works.
Thanks...
mazzanti@salleurl.edu

[brashquido]

This one sounds too good to be true. I know this is the obvious questino, but I'll ask anyway :rolleyes:. Is there any ETA on the public release yet? And how much will it cost?

[ShaneZ]

Originally posted by brashquido
This one sounds too good to be true. I know this is the obvious questino, but I'll ask anyway :rolleyes:. Is there any ETA on the public release yet? And how much will it cost?

ReAuthorist is going to be free I believe, but I am sure Aquabubble would be extremely happy to take donations. :)

[brashquido]

Well if it's as good as it sounds, I'll be happy to support Aquabubble with a donation :)

[klona]

Well, Quite a nice tool you design.

I would really be pleased to be able to try it as I am a CCE/Scenarist/ifoupdate addict from the begining, loving all these great automating tools which saves me lots of time.

You told about looking for CCE script from version 2.6x. Can send you some if you need.

[[Hawkeye]]

Hi aquabubble

When do you think ReAuthorist is going gold?

Sounds like at great prg.

Best Regards

Hawkeye

[AndyP]

Hi

I would be grateful if I could have a copy of the new beta also.

Andy [at] somewhere-out-there.freeserve.co.uk

Thanks,
Andy

[squancey]

Hi Aquabubble,

I've been using DoItFast4U and DoCCE4U for a while now and been very impressed with the results, any chance of getting my hands on the latest beta of Reauthorist to complete the puzzle.

e-mail detail in profile

cheers

squancey

[aquabubble]

Thanks to all those that wanted to be part of the beta test team. Apologies for the delay in getting back to you all, but as you can imagine I have been a very busy man! All those that have recently expressed an interest are now on the list and should have details of the latest beta, version 0.5.0.4. This is an interim beta before the release candidate which is now due very soon. Keep 'em peeled! :)

[brashquido]

Oh man, I can't wait :D

[nlphillips]

I've been watching this thread for a long time and I can't wait to give Re-Authorist a go. Any chance of adding yet another poor, mis-guided soul onto the beta list?

Thankyou :)

[influenza]

You can add me to the list too. Since I've been testing all day on our own software this would be a nice distraction..........

influenza@influenza.speedlinq.nl

[Chevelle]

I also have been watching this thread alot. Is there any way I can get on the beta list also?

chevelle@hush.com

[brashquido]

I've got a question for you aquabubble, as good as ReAuthourist sounds, what audience do you think it'll be aimed at, or usable by.

[list=1]
I'm a one click wonder IC7, DVD95copy, or DVD2one user, don't care how it works, as long as it works.
:
Only used all in one products to date, and am looking for a bit more flexibility/quality, but don't have the time/wish to learn other methods in great detail. Need it simple with minimal user input, and minimal understanding of tools used in background to get the reauthoured DVD.
:
Tried all in one products and they don't give the results I want, am willing to learn new tools as long as they aren't user intensive.
:
DoItFast4U, DoCCE4U user, and have had limited success and have a good general knowledge of DVD structure
:
DVD enthusiast user with high level of success using several different tools, good understanding of DVD structure and the individual tools used in DVD authouring.
:
DVD Guru - totaly comfortable with DVD structure and all the individual tools used for authouring.
[/list=1]

[ShaneZ]

@brashquido:

Well, I have been using DIF4U, DoCCE4U, and ReAuthorist almost since their inception. Before I started using them I knew next to nothing about backing up DVD's. I have never used one of the multiple one-click solutions that are out there, using these tools it is getting close.

As long as you know the basics of DVD backup and you want added flexibility, I would suggest that you switch. The authors of all the programs are more than willing to accomodate features requested by users and are constantly issuing updates.

[taskman]

Do you have any idea yet of a general release date for reauthorist as I cant wait to get my hands on it.

[dssgorila]

how can i get a copy of ReAuthorist

[brashquido]

Originally posted by dssgorila
how can i get a copy of ReAuthorist

It's gotta be released first. Shouldn't be too far off now.

[VerbaL]

Hi,

Today I tried the ReAuthorist beta and I must say...this tool kicks ass. Thanks for this aquabubble!!!

Just one more question I have: I just started a new DVD backup and when checking the IFO files, I noticed that 2 VTSs reuse a vobid which is very short in time (only 1 second). According to Trilight's guide, I can rip that by PGC using DoItFast4U!

Can I also use ReAuthorist to author everything, or does it not support this at the moment?

Thanks,
verb

[dssgorila]

Does ReAuthorist automate the process of scenarist

[ShaneZ]

Originally posted by dssgorila
Does ReAuthorist automate the process of scenarist

Yep, it automates your Scenarist project as long as it does not have to be ripped by VobID.

[dssgorila]

cool can someone send me the beta
dssgorila@yahoo.com

[brashquido]

Me too :)

brashquido@datafast.net.au

[aquabubble]

Well it's certainly good to see all this interest. If you guys that can't wait to get their hands on ReAuthorist can just bear a few days, I'm hoping to have the first public release out very very soon. Things are looking very good right now for me to be confident to let this loose to the pubic following a successful test of my last beta. It's taken me longer than expected, but that's because I have been enhancing its features to ensure a kick-ass launch product :D oh and getting rid of the bugs ;)

[d4g]

how is the vobid implementing going with the product the pgc way works like a charm


d4g