Disabling Aspect Ratio Menu - Not Worth it

[Allistah]

Hi everyone..

Since starting on dvds and trying to disable the aspect ratio menu so that it only displays the widescreen version I have come to the conclusion that its just not worth the time and trouble. What you get in return is minimal for all the investigative work and testing you have to put into it. I wanted to share this with everyone so that any newbies would be able to benefit from my experience and not have to go through what I did.

I tried for about 3 days to get the aspect ratio menu disabled on Monsters Inc. and I just couldn't get it to fly on my set top players. After this amount of time I thought to myself "Even if I do get it to work at this point, was it worth three days worth of work?". I'll say no to that.

What I'm going to do from here on out is leave that menu in and just disable the fullscreen menu option with the menu editor that was posted on this board. This way it just can't be highlighted or clicked on.

After going this route I was able to make a working backup of Monsters Inc the first try because I left that menu in and disabled the fullscreen menu option.

-Allistah

[MackemX]

I agree, not worth the hassle :)

[Ollie W. Holmes]

Here's a question for Mister X. There are quite a few dvds which offer both widescreen / fullscreen movies on a DVD-9 disc. Sometimes the ws and fs are mastered as two vts_xx_**.vob files (where xx refers to two titles) and sometimes they are both contained in one title. Because of the chapter menu problem, I don't see an easy way to generate a DVD-5 disc with just the ws movie, a skinny or non-existant shell for the fs movie, the extras, and a working menu system. AND to do this without re-encoding the ws movie (which loses picture quality).

As a result, I just use Smartripper or DVD Decrypter to rip the ws movie, and build a dvd with that one title. The extras get saved in the VIDEO_TS folder as data files, but they are not accessible on a set top player. This is an ugly way of doing things, but no one has written a guide on how to do it better yet. Or have they?

[mpucoder]

It is not possible to have both 16:9 and 4:3 in the same titleset (vts), so if a movie has both widescreen and full-screen in the same vts then the full-screen is actually pan/scan. In that case, 2 possibilities exist. If the transcoder leaves the pan/scan data intact, keeping both versions costs nothing. On the other hand, if the data is removed the "full-screen" version will be damaged, and will not pan properly.

[PartyBeast]

I have found that removing the aspect menu can usually be accomplished fairly easily by watching the GPRM values while playing the dvd in ifoedit. In most cases a value is set to one of the GPRM's after you choose an aspect ratio. This way you are not asked again to choose an aspect ratio when returning to the menu. Once you have found the GPRM and determined the value being set for wide screen, simply add a command to set this value ahead of time (some investigation will be needed to determine which menu pgc to place this command in), and you will no longer be prompted to choose an aspect ratio. This has worked for me in the three movies that I have backed up that had both aspect ratios on the same dvd, although I have not done Monster Inc., so I don't know if this will be the same. Out of curiosity, I will check it out though and let you know what I find out.

[MackemX]

Originally posted by PartyBeast
(some investigation will be needed to determine which menu pgc to place this command in) LOL :D, some people want results with the press of the BIG RED BUTTON never mind investigating stuff


but thanks for the info cos I'll bear it in mind (I know I said not worth hassle b4) when I do actually come across a dual aspect DVD cos I may just investigate at least once to see if the hassle is worth it cos sometimes I like hassle :D

[2COOL]

Well, it shouldn't be too much of a hassle now. Read here (http://forum.doom9.org/showthread.php?threadid=67564). ;)

Quote from Top Gun

Charlie: It sounds like you know what you're doing with disabling the Aspect Ratio Menus. Are you up to 100 DVDs yet?
Maverick: No, actually I've only done this twice.
Charlie: Oh? How'd you do?
Maverick: Crashed and burned on the first one. It wasn't pretty.
Charlie: The second?
Maverick: I don't know, I'll tell you tomorrow. But it's lookin' good so far