N_F
25th May 2003, 01:30
First of all, this post in not aimed at beginners who've never used OGM (or similar container), nor is it aimed at casual encoders who encodes a movie now and then. It is aimed at people who encode a lot of movies/series with the goal of a near perfectly sized OGM file.
(If you're only interested in my method you can ignore the next 4 paragraphs and skip down to the instructions below the line.)
The most common tools for creating OGM's today is probably VirtualDubMod, followed by Oggmux. These are great tools, but they do have one "problem". They have graphical interfaces. Anyone who does lengthy series will probably recognize that it can be a real pain muxing all the streams to a final OGM with a graphical interface where you have to do everything all over again, especially if you want to add comments to all streams. And it's not very uncommon that you have to remux the streams a couple of times if you get a slightly oversized file or you find a spelling error in a subtitle stream.
With graphical interfaces this becomes a very lengthy and boring process. Still, I did it until a couple of days ago. Some time ago I did a couple of X-files seasons where I added 3 streams (english sound, english subs, swedish subs, and sometimes a fourth director's comments audio stream). As I wanted to fit 3 episodes perfectly on a CD I did a whole lot of remuxing.
A couple of days ago I picked up Twin Peaks season 1. 8 episodes (so not that bad from that perspective), but with 2 audio streams (english and director's comments) and 2 subtitle streams (swedish and english). I decided to try and find a better way.
I knew of a mux tool made by Cyrius that was used before Oggmux and VirtualDubMod existed. I had never tried it, just heard/read about it. I downloaded it and after a while I had come up with a very fast and comfortable way (for series anyway, movies benefit less from it). Instructions follow below:
----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
1) Download OGMuxer 1.1a6 (http://cyrius.bunkus.org/) and place it wherever you place things like this.
2) Open Windows Explorer. Go to Tools --> Folder Options... --> File Types and click on "New". It will ask you for a file extension, put "omx" here and press OK. Select this new extension that will show up in the "registred file types" window and press "advanced".
Press "new" and write an appropiate name at "Action". Personally I use "Run with Ogmuxer", but it doesn't really matter. Next, press "Browse" and look up OGMuxer.exe and press ok. If you've done everything right you should now have a line in the "actions" window with the name you wrote previously ("Run with Ogmuxer" for me). Highlight it and press "edit".
In the "Application used... " window, edit the line so it looks like this:
"C:\Movie Tools\OGMuxer 1.1a6\OGMuxer.exe" -s "%1"
(Of course your path will be different) Press ok until you're back to Windows Explorer.
NOTE: This has only been tested on XP. I would expect it to work on 2000; I have no idea if it works with 98
3) Create a textfile with the extension ".omx". The layout should look something like this:
<input file="C:\RIP\Twin Peaks dvd 3\Twin Peaks - 106.avi"></input>
<input file="C:\RIP\Twin Peaks dvd 3\106 Eng.ogg">
<comment name="LANGUAGE">English</comment>
</input>
<input file="C:\RIP\Twin Peaks dvd 3\106 DC.ogg">
<comment name="LANGUAGE">Director's Comments</comment>
</input>
<input file="C:\RIP\Twin Peaks dvd 3\106 Swe.srt">
<comment name="LANGUAGE">Swedish</comment>
</input>
<input file="C:\RIP\Twin Peaks dvd 3\106 Eng.srt">
<comment name="LANGUAGE">English</comment>
</input>
<output file="C:\RIP\Twin Peaks dvd 3\Twin Peaks - 106.ogm">
<title>Twin Peaks - 106</title>
</output>
For more information how the omx file can look like, see the readme that comes with OGMuxer.
4) Doubleclick on the .omx file and it will hopefully run fine and you'll see the progress in a command prompt window. You can also right click on the file and select "Run with Ogmuxer" (or whatever you called the action).
The big benefit is that you can now remux the same (but likely slightly altered) streams without having to bother manually adding the streams and the comments like you'd have to with the graphical interfaces (VDM, Oggmux). Also, if you're doing series, you can use the same omx file, you probably just need to change a couple of numbers and save it to a different file. (for instance, in the example above I could easily exchange "106" with "107" and it would work perfectly for the next episode).
I hope some of you will find this useful,
N_F
(If you're only interested in my method you can ignore the next 4 paragraphs and skip down to the instructions below the line.)
The most common tools for creating OGM's today is probably VirtualDubMod, followed by Oggmux. These are great tools, but they do have one "problem". They have graphical interfaces. Anyone who does lengthy series will probably recognize that it can be a real pain muxing all the streams to a final OGM with a graphical interface where you have to do everything all over again, especially if you want to add comments to all streams. And it's not very uncommon that you have to remux the streams a couple of times if you get a slightly oversized file or you find a spelling error in a subtitle stream.
With graphical interfaces this becomes a very lengthy and boring process. Still, I did it until a couple of days ago. Some time ago I did a couple of X-files seasons where I added 3 streams (english sound, english subs, swedish subs, and sometimes a fourth director's comments audio stream). As I wanted to fit 3 episodes perfectly on a CD I did a whole lot of remuxing.
A couple of days ago I picked up Twin Peaks season 1. 8 episodes (so not that bad from that perspective), but with 2 audio streams (english and director's comments) and 2 subtitle streams (swedish and english). I decided to try and find a better way.
I knew of a mux tool made by Cyrius that was used before Oggmux and VirtualDubMod existed. I had never tried it, just heard/read about it. I downloaded it and after a while I had come up with a very fast and comfortable way (for series anyway, movies benefit less from it). Instructions follow below:
----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
1) Download OGMuxer 1.1a6 (http://cyrius.bunkus.org/) and place it wherever you place things like this.
2) Open Windows Explorer. Go to Tools --> Folder Options... --> File Types and click on "New". It will ask you for a file extension, put "omx" here and press OK. Select this new extension that will show up in the "registred file types" window and press "advanced".
Press "new" and write an appropiate name at "Action". Personally I use "Run with Ogmuxer", but it doesn't really matter. Next, press "Browse" and look up OGMuxer.exe and press ok. If you've done everything right you should now have a line in the "actions" window with the name you wrote previously ("Run with Ogmuxer" for me). Highlight it and press "edit".
In the "Application used... " window, edit the line so it looks like this:
"C:\Movie Tools\OGMuxer 1.1a6\OGMuxer.exe" -s "%1"
(Of course your path will be different) Press ok until you're back to Windows Explorer.
NOTE: This has only been tested on XP. I would expect it to work on 2000; I have no idea if it works with 98
3) Create a textfile with the extension ".omx". The layout should look something like this:
<input file="C:\RIP\Twin Peaks dvd 3\Twin Peaks - 106.avi"></input>
<input file="C:\RIP\Twin Peaks dvd 3\106 Eng.ogg">
<comment name="LANGUAGE">English</comment>
</input>
<input file="C:\RIP\Twin Peaks dvd 3\106 DC.ogg">
<comment name="LANGUAGE">Director's Comments</comment>
</input>
<input file="C:\RIP\Twin Peaks dvd 3\106 Swe.srt">
<comment name="LANGUAGE">Swedish</comment>
</input>
<input file="C:\RIP\Twin Peaks dvd 3\106 Eng.srt">
<comment name="LANGUAGE">English</comment>
</input>
<output file="C:\RIP\Twin Peaks dvd 3\Twin Peaks - 106.ogm">
<title>Twin Peaks - 106</title>
</output>
For more information how the omx file can look like, see the readme that comes with OGMuxer.
4) Doubleclick on the .omx file and it will hopefully run fine and you'll see the progress in a command prompt window. You can also right click on the file and select "Run with Ogmuxer" (or whatever you called the action).
The big benefit is that you can now remux the same (but likely slightly altered) streams without having to bother manually adding the streams and the comments like you'd have to with the graphical interfaces (VDM, Oggmux). Also, if you're doing series, you can use the same omx file, you probably just need to change a couple of numbers and save it to a different file. (for instance, in the example above I could easily exchange "106" with "107" and it would work perfectly for the next episode).
I hope some of you will find this useful,
N_F