Unreferenced material ?

[Faust2]

Here is the noobish question of the week:

by Sir Didymus:
Be very careful with this title.

Italian release (but I think all PAL R2 releases) contains a DVD protection scheme that makes very troublesome the legitimate backup of this title.

Both the Ifo files and the some cells are intentionally screwed up. In addition there is a plenty of space (if I remind well, something like 800MB) of black video and screwed unreferenced material.

Please take this title as an exception, to handle in very specific manner.

1. You should use Decrypter ver. 3.5.1.0 [Released on last September 2nd]

2. Simply try this first.

3. I never suggest the usage of preprocessing tools, but in case point 2 fails, you could give a try to VobBlanker, [simply load the title and process it...] in order to remove unreferenced material.

4. I am quite sure the troubles you have are not related to DVD-RB, but to the singularities intentionally included in the original title...

I heard some mention of this misterious black stuff and have just a few questions:

1. How do I recognize it (in RB, by looking in the original VIDEO_TS dir or do I have to use VobBlanker)?

2. How does RB handle it? (meaning: If I don't recognize/remove it and the rb-processed job doesn't have any stutters or errors, is it still there? (and taking away space?))

3. In VobBlanker, how do I remove it?

Stuff like this really makes me feel uncomfortable. black materia... there's is more of it present then the physicians expected...

[wmansir]

I don't think DVD-RB makes any attempt to detect unreferenced material, so it is processed just as if it were normal video.

An easy way to find it is to open the disc up in DVD Shrink. It will have a separate folder for unreferenced material. You can replace it with a still image then, or use tools like TitleSetBlanker, VobBlanker or DVDReMake to remove it completely.

I don't know a VobBlanker guide, but it's fairly strait forward to cut/blank out segments.

[erdoke]

Originally posted by wmansir
I don't think DVD-RB makes any attempt to detect unreferenced material, so it is processed just as if it were normal video.

I was thinking that what avg bitrate these unreferenced materials get while reencoded by CCE. :confused:


I don't know a VobBlanker guide, but it's fairly strait forward to cut/blank out segments.

VobBlanker has a Help file in the package now if it was not so straightforward for everybody.

[2COOL]

Originally posted by Faust2
1. How do I recognize it If you process your files through DVD Shrink, it'll show what your unreferenced materials are.

<EDIT> oops! I didn't know wmansir already posted this.

[wmansir]

Originally posted by erdoke
I was thinking that what avg bitrate these unreferenced materials get while reencoded by CCE. :confused:

If they are re-encoded they will get their 'share' of bits, just as if they were regular video. So if the disc gets a 50% reduction overall, so will the unreferenced material.

However, it is common to place unreferenced material in menu VOBs specifically VIDEO_TS.VOB, which means DVD-RB will pass it thru untouched. (Ouch!) So it pays to check for unreferenced material if you spot an unusually large VOB file.

[erdoke]

Originally posted by wmansir
If they are re-encoded they will get their 'share' of bits, just as if they were regular video.

Yes, I guessed so. This is one small drawback of the way Rebuilder is handling the movie. Every cell is a separate movie with the same compression settings. Normally this is an advantage of RB.
I always preprocess my backups with DVDReMake and other tools and usually use RB-Opt to tweak bitrates, so this is personally not so bad for me. Though can be painful when backing up complete long movies. 800 MB of unchanged blackness...

[Sir Didymus]

@Faust2

Nothing relevant on the matter to add respect to what already stated by other kind people...

The presence of this type of stuff is really much more common than one would expect; in Kill Bill 2 (PAL, R2, ITA) there is something around 300MB wasted in the VTS_01_0.VOB, and composed by a menu, already present in the title, with the size of ~20MB, REPEATED ~15 times; in Kill Bill 1 the situation was even worse... So I totally agree on what stated by our moderator: sometimes it pays to check for unreferenced material...

Maybe just to comment on the "Astrophysicals" reasons for the presence of unreferenced materials in original titles it could be mentioned:

1. Authoring errors
2. On early titles, materials included just in order to inflate the title, for making it bigger than the size of a single layer DVD
3. For more recent protection pourposes, including damaged or unreadable cells, for preventing the 1/1 backup of the whole title

Cheers,
SD

[jdobbs]

DVD-RB was designed to do an exact and complete backup of an original DVD -- warts and all. If they put in unreferenced video, the backup also has unreferenced video.

I personally just ignore it. 300MB doesn't make a lot of difference in a 4,700MB environment. I'm not saying it has no impact, but it really doesn't make that much improvement in quality.

[Sir Didymus]

Of course!!!

I think that nobody wanted to suggest any type of changes in the approach of DVD-RB in order to remove unreferenced stuff. For what is concerning myself, I am totally happy with it as it is, believe me, I am very happy... :)

I also wrote clarily that I personally do not suggest any preprocessing on the ripped material. This does not mean that I don't actually perform preprocessings (as many people do) for removing FBIs, Logos, Intros, ... and in general for making the "appearance" of the movie, better matching with my personal flawors...

:D

Every one knows that as soon as some manual intervention on the ripped material is done, then he is on his own and it's better not complaining if some trouble arise. [It is just a theoretic reasoning, I mean, no troubles up to now to report due to the stripping of unreferenced material]...

I would say that more than for obtaining quality improvements, the reasons for removing them are in other (more or less mystic) sides. My reasons for stripping unreferenced stuff are the following:

- I like to play a bit with the involved applications (especially with DVD-RB :) ), with Ifoedit, with the files, I think it's a nice opportunity for learning useful things, it's my hobby, and so on...

- it is disturbing me a lot the idea that some beautiful applications like DVD-RB and CCE would consume themselves (and would destroy the time of my poor CPU) for rebuilding and encoding some faint contents...

- it is even more concerning me the fact that there will be some bytes in the burned DVD that will never been read by a laser beam in the whole life of the media...

- not to mention the phylosophical implications about the existance of this stuff (if it could never been seen then it's harmful to demonstrate its physical being...)...

:cool:

[Faust2]

Thanks for the feedback; so I have to check every title in shrink to be sure. (I once did "to catch a thief" with a half-gig-menue; prolly also with dark materia involved...)

@ sir didymus

totally agreed with all what you said! Rebuilder is a great (working) app, and one of the greatest advantages of it is that its architecture is open, so people actually can pre- or postprocess or tweak avisynth or CCE settings. Nonetheless, it should be clear (as it is totally logic and understandable) that rebuilder relys on the commercial, professional authored DVD and in case of preprocessed sources this factor can't be provided. So people just should be aware of this fact and stop complaining if butchering doesn't work.

Having said this, I dimly remember (incorrectly :) ?) that jdobbs said once, he prolly would implement a possibility to strip content at some point...
I don't know if he's still having this thing on his list, but if not, I can live with it...

(although it would be great to have it in one app :) )

[jdobbs]

That will happen -- but not until after v1.00 gets released.

[Faust2]

:cool: