Low bitrate dissapointment - LOTR EE

[n1ck0s]

I am currently backing up Lord of the Rings - Extended Edition.

Main movie uses two disks. There is AC3, DTS, stereo and 4 audio commnetaries.

After demuxing:
Average bitrate for Disk 1: 2500 (w/ DTS), 3300 (no DTS)
Average bitrate for Disk 2: 1500 (w/ DTS), 2350 (no DTS)

1500 Mbps!!! After examining the disk a little bit, I realized that in Disk 2 there are ~30 minutes of end credits. Is there a way to loose them? I am desperately looking ways to raise bitrate since I really want to keep DTS...

[Trahald]

:(

Well, you can.. heres something that comes to mind.. after dif4u demuxes, load your avs file for the main movie into virtual dub.. find and write down the frame # for the start of the credits. Then add this line to that .avs with note pad

Trim(0,x)

(x being the frame you discovered in virtualdub as the start of credits)

add this to the end of the .avs script and save it. test it in windows media player or virtual dub to make sure you did it right and it ends at the beginning of the credits.

then load up reauthorist. it will calculate bitrate based on the shorter time given by the avisynth file. if you normally use reauthorist, procede as usual. if not you'll have to hit encode now and either use docce4u or load the new_*something*.txt file that it makes into batchCCEWS and use that . be warned sometimes reauthorist oversizes a little. if so, but reload batchccews and crank the bitrate for your feature down by like 50 (and hit + Replace) then reencode, etc

[n1ck0s]

I will try that right away, thx.

My hopes are restored since the size of VIDEO_TS.VOb and VIDEO_1.VOB are etxremely high (>500mb). I remember that I once read about dummy menu files or something like that. I know numenu can handle those but unfortunately numenu doesn't work to my PC. It just hangs after demuxing.

Can anyone give me some sort directions on how to detect dummy cells inside menu files and get rid of them?

[Trahald]

you can try numenu4u first.. then test to make sure all your navigation still works ok before running doitfast4u on the new iso. i think it also detects dummies. (not sure) main thing is it will reduce the bitrate.

if you are feeling 'hardcore', you can reauthor the whole disk. just demux the menus, everything (you have to demux menus by vobid - and you can use vsrip to get the menu subs out). when you do it by hand its easy to identify whats faked or not. good learning experience on how scenarist works. fun stuff :)

[n1ck0s]

I cant make numenu work. It just hangs after demuxing. Really frustrating...

[Chubmeister]

I have been having a nightmare with the PAL EE of fellowship and TT. I cannot get Numenu4u to work for either of them, but...

When it 'hangs' if you just cancel or click 'dont send' if using XP, then it will continue and finish as normal.

The files that have been created will work but I have noticed that the navigation can be a little screwy (not surprisingly), but it did work enough to use.

I have tried different OS and different avisynths and whatever else I can think of, it seems to be simply down to one file in the menu somewhere.

I'm going to keep trying until I can get this to work and will let you know.

Chubs

[n1ck0s]

Numenu just hangs w/ no error report window or anything else. It sits there using 100% CPU just after demuxing...

In another thread I read that fieldorder.exe does this sometimes and killing it manually is the answer. But there aren't any suspicious proccesses running in my PC during numenu execution...

[Chubmeister]

If it's the fieldorder.exe program thats running you should see it as it runs in a dos shell. I have had it hang here also, just kill the dos shell and I think it continues on its merry way after this.

[n1ck0s]

No, its not... It isn't any other proccess in the backgroung either... Numenu never worked for me, perhaps i should try the "format" solution.

[Mephiston]

I tried NuMenu on lord the rings also but it loses a lot of the buttons. Too bad because the quality was excellent.

I use DVDShrink on menu's now, numenu loses buttons on most of them. you can usually bring a menu down 25% in shrink before you start seeing any real macroblocks.

[ou8thisSN]

hi, I am a complete newbie to the forum, and I am trying to do the exact same thing but with a few notable differences:

I want the video to be untouched, and have DD5.1 and the english subtitles. After I launched DVD Decrypter in file mode and in the stream selection, I cut out all that stuff, the end size total was around 5gb for the first disc. Now, suppose I do the exact same process on the second disc.

Can I split this movie into 3 DVD5 Discs without reencoding or something? Is there an easy way to do this? lets say disc 1 is 5gb, disc2 is also 5gb, then the total is 10 gb, but 3 DVDRs can write like 13 gb, well then I can go back and add the DTS sttrk or like the DC to the discs. But I cant, for the life of me figure out what program to use to Join the two "ripped" movie files into one huge one, and then make appropriate cuts so that they will fit nicely on 3 DVD5s. If someone can suggest something, please point me in the right direction.

really, all i want is the movie, (no menus, if that helps on keeping the size down), dd5.1 and eng subtitles.

[Matthew]

@ou8thisSN, it's tricky joining and then splitting because of sync issues - the end of an audio and video frame don't often coincide, especially not for NTSC. You can pad/chop the streams a little when joining disc 1 and disc 2, but you'll still get desync of some kind most likely - although it should be less than 1 audio frame (32ms).

One way to get around this is to have the first 2/3 of disc 1 on DVDR1 and the last 2/3 of disc 2 on DVDR3. Then DVDR2 can contain the last 1/3 of disc 1 and the first 1/3 of disc2.

What you are left with are two separate parts for DVD-R2, but you can use Scenarist to have them play one after the other with only a momentary pause in playback and no loss of the time clock, etc. They will be part of the same PGC. If you are lucky you may even be able to link them seamlessly, but don't bet on it.

As to how to do the cutting, personally I'd use M2Edit Pro for the video (but only cut on an i-frame to avoid any re-encoding around the cut point) and headAC3he for cutting the AC3(s). It's necessary to calculate audio delays for DVDR2 and DVDR3 through. e.g. when you cut 2/3 of the way through disc 3, if the audio is longer (shorter) than the video by 20 ms at the end then you should have a positive (negative) audio delay of 20ms at the start of DVDR2.

The are vob chopping utils but I don't trust them for soemthing like this...

Anyway, this movie should fit on 2 DVDRs if you have only the movie, AC3 5.1 and subs. If it does require re-encoding, it won't be much, and better than a 3 disc solution IMO. Be sure to chop off the fan club credits though.

[n1ck0s]

Yes, chopping off the fun club credits did the trick for me. Simply adding a line like:

Trim(0, 149000).FadeOut2(100)

, for the second disk seems to help a lot. There is also a dummy video inside video_ts.vob which takes up to 500MB of space. Loosing this dummy and chopping off the credits raise the bitrate from ~1500 to ~2900.