Big3/Scenarist - I'm about to give up

[Wensleydale]

After several attempts the big3 have finally broken me. I've had one successful try, The Godfather part I. That was also the first try. After that I went on to extras discs, TV-series, and other "non-main movie" discs.
The problem has every time been scenarist. First time around it was the "place holder" error, I got around that. Then came the "different duration" screw up, got around that too by some excellent advice here in the forum. But after each step forward scenarist has always crashed. I keep getting a critical error which terminates the program, and now I just don't know what to do. I figured that maybe windows is playing tricks on me so I tried it in fail safe mode - same problem. I'm still thinking about trying with win2k instead of XP which I now have, but do you think it would solve anything?
The last disc I tried I was confident that everything would go ok since it was a regular movie (The Graduate) and not one with a couple of hundred VTS sets, but no dice - crash.
There has to be some way. If I want to copy a disc without any significant extras and I'm happy with just the movie (I don't care much for menus, unless there are extras, then I want the menus) then I use DVD2DVD. I think it's excellent, just one click and then sit back and get comfy. I wish there were a similar solution that copied the whole disc. I refuse to use programs like DVDshrink.
So, any ideas on what might help. Scenarist shouldn't behave like that should it?

[fusion007]

you are not alone my freind i too have been plagued with errors,ok most have been solved with the great help from the guys in the forum,but because the layout/contents of a dvd are always changing its hard to get it right everytime so it wastes alot of ones time unless youre really clued up,when alls said and done its only a dvd!personally last night i hit another problem (playback probs)and i thought f@"£k it! thats it ive had enough of my time wasted but then i got up this morning and started t3 and it went perfect not even a subpicture out of bounds bitch from scenarist so wotta ya do..
you have a couple of choices,wait while a fool proof method comes along or go to a prog like dvd2vcd which i have found works every single time 75 backups and counting!(for me!!!)

[Wensleydale]

Thanks for hearing me fusion. I don't know how many hours I've spent encoding in vain, it's soooo frustrating. I've also spent a lot of time overclocking my computer and pushing that CCE speed as far as possible, not that I've done that for nothing though, better performance is always good I guess...
In my first posting I guess I ment DVD2VCD, sorry. And yeah it works great!
I guess when the double-layer burners come everybody's problems will be over. Still I don't want to wait for that!

Anyone else on how to remedy?

[Eyes`Only]

critical errors that terminate the program? I've never seen one of those. Well, maybe ONCE but that was a long time ago.

[Wensleydale]

Well at least I think the right term is critical error, not sure, I'm not using an english version of windows. I mean the kind of crash that forces you to ctrl+alt+del and close it, although now I just get a sign saying that there's been some kind of error and that the program will shut down.
Surely you've must have come across one of those? Perhaps you mean when fiddling with dvd proggies.

Haha, right this minute I got NEW error in scenarist that I've never seen before, it came during importing. I didn't get a proper chance to see what it said cause my vnc connection were lost just at the same time. I think it said something about sequence code. I will check when I get home, come back and beg for more help! :)

[Eyes`Only]

Well yes, I've seen critical errors, just not often when it comes to Scenarist. I can't remember the last time Scenarist crashed on me, honestly.

When it comes to other apps I sometimes see it often :D

[Wensleydale]

Ah, I thought so :)

My vnc connection came to live again so here's some of my new adventures:

Ok, the error msg that I mentioned earlier was the following:

Warning This Video [ E:\vobs\graduate\VTS01\VTS__01_P01-NO-CCE.4~3_1.M2V ] has different duration.
Error The scene ( VTS_01_PGC_01, VTS01_vobid02_cellid01 ) timecode ( 00:00:00;24 ) is bigger than video duration.
Warning E:\vobs\graduate\VTS01\VTS__01_P01-NO-CCE.4~3_1.M2V
Warning : Number of SequenceEndCode is 2.
Error Importing failed

Apparently the first 4 pgc's were just 1 sec long. So what I tried was that I opened the ReAuthorist.scp file and changed item=video to item=encoded still on those 4. Said and done I again imported - no error msg! Hooray! Merrily I started to generate the files but as soon as that process started the program crashed.
Not giving up I now went back to reauthorist, unchecked those first 4 so that they became dummy's instead. Program crashed when finished importing.
Still not giving up I opened the scn-file that scenarist had created and started to generate the files, thinking that it might work anyway. And at first it did! The percents went by just lovely, but then I get this: Error Subpicture[1] (1:VTS_03_VSUB_P4A1-00-F-Eng_1.sp) and (2:VTS_03_VSUB_P4A1-00-F-Eng.sp) offset are overlapped (00:00:00;00-00:00:00;03) and (00:00:00;00-00:00:00;10)
Error dvd_mux : Open Mux_list File Error
Error Terminated Multiplexing (tryfour.scn-VTS_03_PGC_04_t.vob).
Error Wrong mux_list. Mux_list format or stream ID may be wrong.
Error Multiplex is failed.
Info Multiplexing failed, Track<VTS_03_PGC_04>

Error MuxFromDB:MuxVTS failed
Error Multiplex failed
Error DVD files could not be created

Now I'm lost again...

Eye's only,
Just wanted to say that your proggy is excellent! It's doing it fizzle fo mizzle! :)

[Wensleydale]

Hang on!
Well waddya know! I rolled up my newbie-sleeve once more, went back to ReAuthorist and unchecked that VTS_03_PGC_04-culprit and imported again. This time both the importing and generating went smooth! Victory at last!

Feeling a bit better about the whole thing now. The problem seems to remain though when dealing with those non main movie discs, and I've got a whole bunch of those that needs backing up.

[Eyes`Only]

Congrats on your success. RA is obviously not perfect, as you are seeing. You seem serious enough about this for me to offer this advice: Learn to author in Scenarist manually. That way, when you come across seemingly-impassable snags, you can just resort to the old way and finish your project (manually authoring takes about another 15 minutes once you get it down). For help with this see some of the older guides on Doom9, as well as Trilight's guides at http://dvdguides.trilight.net

[Wensleydale]

Thank you, I believe I will do that!

Unfortunately the project wasn't a success after all. I ran IfoUpdate, that seemed to go fine, but when I tried to play the files there were problems. My DVD-player wouldn't play the disc. WinDVD did, but there were for instance one menu that was non-clickable, there were also no subs.
I'm giving up on this particular disc and running dvd2vcd instead. I will however take my renewed confidence and get on with the next in line.

Thanks for the support!