ReAuthorist is up to version 0.6.2

[aquabubble]

Ladies and gentlemen,

Firstly I must give you my sincere apologies for the lack of any status update on the development of ReAuthorist. This is due to a combination of factors that have resulted in all my waking and sleeping hours being used up. I have not rested!

I said many weeks ago that ReAuthorist would not be too long in appearing. It seems I'm not very good at estimating eh guys? ;) Well, it's not that it's taken me longer to put in those things that I originally wanted, it's purely that I've found more and more things to make people's lives easier to incorporate. Although this first release of RA is designed for PGC rips, it is now an extremely flexible tool, capable of helping to author complex projects where IfoUpdate's Adjusted Cell Mode can be used.

Doom9 has been busy writing a guide for using ReAuthorist and when it's ready I will post the link here for my lovely testers. :D

Anyway people, to prove how busy I have been I attach my latest change log for your perusal.

As a parting shot, here is my present list of things to do for the final release:
[list=1]
MPEG audio streams support
Closed captions support
Fix problems with multiple subpicture streams of the same language
More default options
[/list=1]

[brashquido]

I liked my topic title so much, I thought I'd use it again ;) . Anyway, this is just a bit of a cut and paste of a post from the DoItFast4U 1.1.1 thread with some problems I'm having which Eyes 'Only informs me are going to be ReAuthorist related.

On my latest projects (Region 4 PAL version of Bad Company and Minority Report) using the big three I've noticed these quirks;

1) After demuxing the Minority Report, I noticed once I mounted the demux folder with ReAuthorist 6.2 that there was an AC3 dummy file in there at 0x81. The weird thing is that after examining the IFO in IFOedit there is no AC3 track on 0x81 in the original movie, and indeed when I look at the VTSes to be demuxed in DoItFast4U there is no AC3 track listed on 0x81. I can get around it easily enough by just deleting the dummy, just have no idea why it's created in the first place. Weird.

2) PGC 2 in VTS 1 on both movies are very short, 18 frames for Bad Company, and 1 second for the Minority Report and are replaced with dummy scenes by ReAuthourist. The problem is that when going to author my DVD's I'm given a "Scene duration must be 0.4 second" error, and then Scenarist aborts the process. I didn't have time to check the scene durations in my lunchbreak, but I'm imagining that they are 00:00:00:00. Any idea why this would happen?

[XCPU]

Please tell me where can I download it...please...........

I have left my email address for recieving your beta version,but I haven't get it yet, Could you see it to me please?

Thank you very much!!

xcpu@hotmail.com

Hope get it as soon as possible...

[berdif]

Please don't let this be a begging thread too! Aqua will post a link to Re-authorist as soon as Doom9 has a guide over Re-authorist!

[aquabubble]

Hi XCPU,

You were one of the last people to ask in the old thread. When I get a spare 5 minutes I will be adding all your names to my list - so don't fret, you will get it soon.

But please, everybody, no more asking where to get it, no more posting email addresses! I now have enough testers and posts of this kind tarnish my threads. Thank you for your cooperation! :D

[XCPU]

Thank you aquabubble!!! Today is really a niceeeeeeeeeeeeeeee day!!!!
Thank you very much!!!!:p :p :p

[EcchiNut]

begging? whose begging?

[hendrix]

Another begging thread - dont you people read through threads before asking questions, you can get a copy by going to EFnet here (http://forum.doom9.org/showthread.php?s=&threadid=53176)

[XCPU]

Forgive me. I don't know where is the EFnet...
Would you please give me an url??

[hendrix]

Originally posted by XCPU
Forgive me. I don't know where is the EFnet...
Would you please give me an url??

download an IRC program - i use mirc (http://www.mirc.com/)
connect to EFnet then join #doom9dls

[Eyes`Only]

If this begging continues, I'm afraid our next course of action will be to just delete begging posts as soon as we see them, without responding to them at all. Knock it off you IRC-illiterate mofos!

[brashquido]

Hi All,

Just wondering if any other beta testers have come across problems with the total project file size after using the auto-size feature? I've redone my latested project twice now, and both times RA has listed 4319.92MB for muxed data, and 142.71MB for VIDEO_TS data, which adds upto 4462.63MB in total which is spot on. However, after authoring my DVD in Scenarist and copying the authored vobs (no dummies) to the VIDEO_TS folder my end project is 93.6MB oversized. Obviously next time I redo the project I can just manually set the muxed data to 100MB less, but I was just wondering why this would be because this is the first project this has happened to.

[hendrix]

@brashquido - i never had any problems with project file size.
the only problems i had was input failed so i just use RA to calculate bitrate and import them manually, im not complaining since i understand that its still an early beta.

[69Mws]

@brashquido:

I never had any problems with oversizing when using the Auto-Size Option. In fact, all reauthored DVDs were very precisely calculated to fit a DVD-R.

What setting did you choose for maximum DVD Size in RA?

Mine is set to "4680000000 bytes (recommended)" and I never had problems so far.

Greetz
69Mws

[brashquido]

Yeah mines set to the 4680000000 byte setting too, which has never given me trouble before. I remember my first project was within 35k of predicted setting. That's why it suprised me so much.

[aquabubble]

Hi guys! Right, I am back at my desk again...

Funnily enough, today I am working on tweaking the sizing. In fact, I think there might be an issue with multiple audio tracks where the bitrate is about 192kbps (normally 2 channel audio). I think this is where people would have any issues with the sizing. Brashquido - could you let me see the RA log for this one, just so I can check?

Cheers :D

[brashquido]

Well that'll be me then. This project has 11 VTSes, and four of those have multiple 192kbps audio tracks. I send my log file to you now.

[69Mws]

I'm actually dealing with some episodic DVDs (e.g. german R2 of Sex & the City) which have 192 kbps Audio.

So far I didn't end up with oversizing at the end. Maybe I'm a lucky bastard :D

Greetz
69Mws

[brashquido]

Has it got multiple audio tracks?

[69Mws]

Originally posted by brashquido
Has it got multiple audio tracks?

Yup, the original DVDs have several languages and I always keep german and english, both 192 kbps.

Just finished now a DVD from Sex & the City Season 2 (german R2) and it came out precisely to 4.36 GB.

Greetz
69Mws

[fourtyfour]

servus...

Well, the recommended size works very fine for me :)

Mostly 4.35 GB output :)

Sometimes 4.34, sometimes 4.36 GB

I never had any problems with created filesize :)


BTW: I found a method to use PCM audio with RA :

DIF4U creates the pcm as *.wav
rename the *.waf to *.vob and copy this file into the VIDEO_TS folder.
RA detects these file in VIDEO_TS and set a lower bitrate automatic.
Encode the files.

return RA to detect the newly encoded files.

"Author it" again and import the script into Scenarist.

everything will be imported, without the pcm.

So import the pcm manually and click start.

Et voila, pcm import with less work :)

[hendrix]

@fourtyfour

your pcm method with RA is genius - nuff said :D

[aquabubble]

Hi guys,

Just to let you know that doom9 has very kindly and assiduously written a guide for ReAuthorist. I'm letting my beta testers have the link to it before I go public. Main guide here:

http://www.doom9.org/mpg/ra-guide.htm

Linked from step2 are some instructions for how to use the special adjusted cell mode of IfoUpdate, which ReAuthorist makes simplicity itself:

http://www.doom9.org/mpg/reauthorist-ap2.htm

Have fun! :D

[Eyes`Only]

Guide 1 is nice. Guide 2 is erroneous. ACM mode of ifoupdate is in NO WAY as simple as that guide would like you to believe. All 15frame cells have to placed at the end of the video, which requires demuxing by vobid mode in many cases. Example: If a 10 cell PGC has a cell 6 that is only 15 frames long, it must be placed at the end, so the order of the cellids would be 1,2,3,4,5,7,8,9,10,6. There are many other hidden complications too that users will experience when they attempt ACM. ACM mode was not made to work with a pgc demuxed project. From what I can tell it was made to work by demuxing by vobid and then putting it all together into one PGC in the order that the ifoupdate gui diagram shows. It can be put into multiple PGCs as long as the cell order still matches. This 'over-simplification' of the ACM method is not only misleading, but has a high failure-ratio. I have experimented with ACM mode until I was ready to scream and throw my monitor at the wall. It's frustrating, undocumented, and possibly buggy (though I don't know, because the official behavior is vague at best).

That being said, I don't approve of that guide at all, as it makes it look too easy. It's a great idea, it just doesn't really work like that though. Props to Doom9 for attempting to create a guide for it, but without extensive research, that guide is just going to frustrate many. Remember that I said this: There will be lots of complaints of users that try that guide. The undocumentation of ifoupdate will keep us in the dark as to how to fix many of the errors that will arise too. You are gonna have your hands full when ppl try that guide using a pgc demux. It works on occasion yes, but many times it doesn't. Good luck!

As a plus: perhaps some of more apt users of our tools will embrace this ACM mode as a challenge (it will be!) and find time to discover the real way to use ACM correctly and/or document it with a guide so that we can learn to do this mode correctly?!

[dumb13]

Folks,

When trying to open http://www.doom9.org/mpg/ra-guide.htm I got a page full of this:

‹Ý}koÛXÒæ÷
æ?°=xÇö®,ëâ{'œ8éöNÒÉÆI 4Ð $Jâ˜"5$eÇóaûV=UuÎ!%¹�Þ»ØyñÎÄ6yx.u¯§ê¼˜×‹ìò¯y1Oâ ÿo�ÖYrùv•eÑõ×ëèU<¾[-£Ù*�$Ñ‹Cù+=¶Hê8š×õò ù÷*½¹óºÈë$¯>?.“�h,?½Ü©“oõ!ãÇh<�Ë*©_¦Uqpvv|~Ðßᑲ4¿‹Ê${¹SÕ�YRÍ“¤Þ‰æe2}¹ÓíNŠbqÞWÕNTÓÐ:"ÿÌ/Wã2]Öá_þßÇòÛ�¨*Ç/w¦e¼Hè»ÝÑ+/åoüî¡-yTL£Ñl\dEùrçooñú G?öð|myùb´yk^Žhì¥<ôyžVºc)=\'ñx=«h^8§ ©ã4OóYô׿DQrŸ”�Q\Ñ2¢eI«Éë¨È£zžDE™ÎÒ<΢IZ�»ÑM½[EË¢ªÒQ–ð·ÊdQÜÓ·V“´ ‡£j5Â!bܺ¤WQœOè¹e�“hU%

Than the guide comes from Step 1.

Is it my browser, or something other may happened to that page?

Thanks and Regards
dumb

[fourtyfour]

servus...

The Guide seems not to work with Mozilla.

IE 6.0 works fine.


Minor thing:

The guide recommends Ifoupdate to do the GetVTS Sectors Job.
I recommends Ifoedit to do this job.

Some of the players like my Hamran & Kardon DVD 25 won´t accept the DVD with GetVTS Sectors from Ifoupdate.

Every movie with Ifoedit works very well :)

[Fmazzanti]

Just a quick question about ReAuthorist... please don't kill me about it. Can it be used to do PARTIAL backups? I mean, I've noticed that when doing a full DVD backup, many many movies end up with a bitrate of 3000 or less. Now I find it a little bit too low... furthermore, many extras are crap, not to tell about damn interlaced PAL material which I simply hate. I haven't found yet a good way to treat it... deinterlacing brings quality loss, and not deinterlacing makes it play jerky. All and all, I'd rather forget about some of the extras.
So how would you do that with DIF4U + RA, and keep a good DVD structure? RIP everything in DIF4U and then check only what you want in RA, or what?
Thanks...

[aquabubble]

Hi Fmazzanti

As much as I hate to give advice as to how to butcher a DVD... you should rip everything and then deselect the PGCs you don't want to keep in RA. Then click autosize again.

This retains your DVD structure, but I have to say that if strange things happen with the navigation, I cannot support any problems you may have ;)

[fourtyfour]

servus...

Well, some movie have bitrate killers like the Walt Disney ones.

I don´t need 3 Trailers of movies, that I owned already or doesn´t want to see.

So, just unclick this VTS and RA sets a dummy for this pgc. :)

In this case, mostly played before menu, so u have to fit the ifo files.

[brashquido]

Originally posted by Fmazzanti
Just a quick question about ReAuthorist... please don't kill me about it. Can it be used to do PARTIAL backups? I mean, I've noticed that when doing a full DVD backup, many many movies end up with a bitrate of 3000 or less. Now I find it a little bit too low... furthermore, many extras are crap, not to tell about damn interlaced PAL material which I simply hate. I haven't found yet a good way to treat it... deinterlacing brings quality loss, and not deinterlacing makes it play jerky. All and all, I'd rather forget about some of the extras.
So how would you do that with DIF4U + RA, and keep a good DVD structure? RIP everything in DIF4U and then check only what you want in RA, or what?
Thanks...

You can actually find a work around for the jerky interlaced playback problem in this thread (http://forum.doom9.org/showthread.php?s=&threadid=51776).

[Fmazzanti]

Thanks brashquido, I'll check that.
In any case, let me say that I also hate to butcher a DVD as a concept. However, and as I said before, I start to think that fitting a DVD9 into a DVD5 results many times in an unacceptable quality loss.
As for exemple, many people here claims a bitrate of 1850 or so delivers good quality for extras... that's even lower than what I used when encoding SVCDs! I would say that 1850 is enough dependeing on the source material. I've checked that if the source is 4:3, then 1850 is not good in fast moving scenes, for exemple... at least with PAL material. That's why I start to think that removing extras may be a solution (and many times these are not that interesting after all).

Well going back to the question, aquabubble, you say I must rip everything in DIF4U and the check what I want in RA and leave the rest unchecked. Well I tried that yesterday and it seemed that DoCCE4U was still encoding the unchecked stuff. I killed that at once so I cannot tell about the final result, but still, what's the pourpose of encoding what you don't need?
Thanks ;)

[69Mws]

Fmazzanti:

Rip everything and then uncheck in RA the PGCs you don't wanna keep and those won't be encoded. Also uncheck audio and subs in the related PGCs.

All that's unchecked will be replaced by dummies in the script.

You can even replace whole Titlesets by that, just make sure you also run IfoUpdate on that "dummy-filled" Titlesets after ReAuthoring.

Greetz
69Mws

[69Mws]

Originally posted by 69Mws
Fmazzanti:

Rip everything and then uncheck in RA the PGCs you don't wanna keep and those won't be encoded. Also uncheck audio and subs in the related PGCs.

All that's unchecked will be replaced by dummies in the script.

You can even replace whole Titlesets by that, just make sure you also run IfoUpdate on that "dummy-filled" Titlesets after ReAuthoring.

Greetz
69Mws

Supplemental:
I just noticed when unchecking PGCs in RA they will be passed to DoCCE4U anyway for encoding. So you need to delete the relating jobs in DoCCE4U.

The RA Script will be fine anyway, 'cause it points to dummies.

Greetz
69Mws

[Fmazzanti]

Yes I already noticed that unwanted PGCs are still sent to DoCCE4U.
Now my question is: when are these dummies created? Because I hit the Author button in RA and didn't see any dummy at all...

[catss]

Hi,

concerning the unwanted PGCs in DoCCE4U, if you don´t want to do any additional changes to the paramaters set in RA, you could just load the .ecl file RA will write after you press Author it.
You can just load that with EclCCE and only the checked pgcs will be encoded. Since this works for nearly all PAL projects I don´t use DoCCE4U at all.
After you pressed Author it, everything including the Dummys should be there, just try loading the script in scenartist, it will tell you if the files are missing, but I doubt that.

[69Mws]

Originally posted by Fmazzanti
Yes I already noticed that unwanted PGCs are still sent to DoCCE4U.
Now my question is: when are these dummies created? Because I hit the Author button in RA and didn't see any dummy at all...

They should be created after hitting the "Author It" Button.

The dummies should be located in the same folder as the corresponding Titleset/PGC and are named *.dummy.ac3, *.dummy.mpv and so on.

Greetz
69Mws

[aquabubble]

Oh! It seems you've discovered a bug! :D I will fix it right this minute...

[stanleycup]

Ooops, should have posted my message in this thread, I apologize

I just finished using DoItFast4U, DC4U and ReAuthorist using Doom's
ReAuthorist guide and I'm at the stage where you import the
ReAuthorist.SCP script file (generated by ReAuthorist) into
Scenarist.

But Scenarist is also asking for a Scenarist .scn file. Is this file
generated by ReAuthorist when you hit the Author It button? I can't seem to find any .scn file in my working DVD folder anywhere.

I'm using Reauthorist 0.63, DC4U 1.014, DoItFast4U 1.11

Any help would be appreciated.

[D3s7]

That's the file you want to create.... just make up a name in there....

it imports from the script to that file

[stanleycup]

So just create a text file with nothing in it and it will import
the .scp file to it?

[D3s7]

no...

just click on the button next to the line and put in a name... file is auto created... think of it as a "save as" button

[Fmazzanti]

No. Just write a name there and hit Ok. Then Scenarist will start processing the streams and will write the file in the end.

BTW yesterday I tried to uncheck unwanted streams in RA and this time it created the dummies without problems. I wonder what went wrong the other days...

[VerbaL]

Aqua,

Just trying out the latest version 0.6.3.2 and I still had the problem where an unchecked pgc showed up in the DoCCE4U window. This happened after using the preview window on that one and using autosize.

If I would uncheck the PGC right after I loaded my project and without touching anything it else, this wouldn't happen.

Not that it's a big issue ;-) The program still does a kickass job :D

Greetz,
verb

edit: forget to mention that i still use docce4u 1.0.1.0, maybe that's got something to do with it.

[aquabubble]

Thanks for the report Verbal - I'll look into it again :(

[Fmazzanti]

Just a quick note. I tried to replace sets in RA with dummies by unchecking items, and the outcome of the project was undersized by 0.5Gb and didn't work properly once IfoUpdated.
It is ok for me, as RA was NOT designed to butcher DVDs as aquabubble has said several times. I can't complain... and I would not complain if he was supporting this option either because he is giving this to us as a gift :) I must say on the other hand that I've backed up 20+ full DVDs with RA and they all came simply perfect. This is really amazing...

[stanleycup]

I'm just curious as to what kind of DVDs the ReAuthorist, DoItFast4U, DC4U combination has trouble backing up?

I'm particularly interested in backing up episodic DVDs like
the Star Trek Next Generation & Friends DVD collections. Do these DVDs get backed up properly?

[hendrix]

I backed up the family guy with RA and worked perfectly

[Dragon22]

Also had a DVD where it says that the main PGC is negative in size....

Other then that I think it fixed a few issues I was havign with it crashign scenarist :)

[69Mws]

Originally posted by stanleycup
I'm just curious as to what kind of DVDs the ReAuthorist, DoItFast4U, DC4U combination has trouble backing up?

I'm particularly interested in backing up episodic DVDs like
the Star Trek Next Generation & Friends DVD collections. Do these DVDs get backed up properly?

I did a lot backups of (PAL) episodic DVDs and never had trouble with it. Always came out fine to 4.35 - 4.36 GB.

You just have to watch out for the same things as in "normal" DVDs, like demuxing by VOB ID (if absolutely needed) is not supported by RA at the moment.

So far I didn't run into an episodic DVD that needed demxing by VOB ID.

I saw it only few times with Buffy DVDs, where a very small PGC used a VOB ID that was also used by another PGC. I let RA replace this small PGC with a dummy by unchecking it in RA (it only contained this 20th Century Fox Logo anyway). So I had no problems with the automated ReAuthoring Process.

Greetz
69Mws

[Fmazzanti]

BTW when I use the DIF4U+RA+DoCCE4U I end up with a folder with subfolders named VTS_01 VTS_02 and so on that in the end of the project are empty. All files go stright to the main folder and all encoded material is named VTS__0X_P0X.16~9.mpv.mv2 which I have to rename by hand to remove the .mv2 extension or Scenarist simply skips them... Is this normal?
I'm using latest RA, latest DIF4U and DOCCE4u vrsion 1.0.1.2 (I trid higher version but these didn't start my CCE SP 2.50).