BD3D2MK3D v1.17: Convert 3D BDs or MKV to 3D SBS, T&B or Frame-sequential MKV

[brochild]

I have Potplayer installed as suggested, it's a much better player, I agree.
I can see all the subtitle streams using that player, I can select each one as needed.

[Thalyn]

Originally Posted by r0lZ

Please keep us informed, and if the problem occurs again, try to describe exactly what you did. Thanks in advance!

(Of course, if you use only FRIMSource now and DGMVCDecode is really the culprit, the problem will probably never occur any more, but who knows?)

I'm also interested in results of speed tests, although I don't think that FRIMSource can be really faster than DGMVCSource.

Decided to do a few test runs just to see what happens with BatB.

DGMVCSource using hardware still fails (goes and stays black). However, possibly because I've performed the updates to my available software and drivers, it's now wildly inconsistent as to when exactly it does it.

However, DGMVCSource forced to use software decoding worked perfectly. Due to the aforementioned issue I can't give a speed comparison directly, however it was roughly 85% of the speed of FRIMSource using hardware. Different systems and configurations will obviously be different (my x264 settings are somewhere between Slow and Slower, run by a 4.2GHz 4770K).

Unfortunately, I wasn't able to get a direct comparison of hardware speeds. I ran a shorter encode to get speeds for both but DGMVCSource failed almost at the start, significantly inflating its speed as black frames compress rather quickly. I'll have to go back to something I know DGMVCSource handles fine to do those tests more accurately.

NB This isn't a slight at DGMVCSource or Donald. I have a lot of respect for his work on that plugin.

[r0lZ]

Hum, apparently, it's a problem related to the Intel driver. That means unfortunately that it is not possible to trust the Intel decoder in all cases, but the version currently distributed with BD3D2MK3D should work fine in software mode on all machines. Correct?
But if it's really d bug in the drivers, FRIMSource in hardware mode should fail too. Therefore, there is something I don't understand.
Anyway, thanks for your tests.

@brochild: Thanks for the confirmation.
Can I consider your issue as closed?

[brochild]

Originally Posted by r0lZ

@brochild: Thanks for the confirmation.
Can I consider your issue as closed?

Yes, please consider my matter closed.

PS
I'm loving the potplayer.
goodbye PowerDVD

[r0lZ]

Fine. Thanks.

BTW, if you adopt PotPlayer, you may want to select Settings -> Output file name -> 3D format extension -> For Bino, PotPlayer...
And, in PotPlayer's Preference, go to Video -> 3D video mode, and tick the last two options. It will detect the right format of the 3D files, and display them accordingly automatically. Very handy!

Have fun!

[brochild]

Originally Posted by r0lZ

Fine. Thanks.

BTW, if you adopt PotPlayer, you may want to select Settings -> Output file name -> 3D format extension -> For Bino, PotPlayer...
And, in PotPlayer's Preference, go to Video -> 3D video mode, and tick the last two options. It will detect the right format of the 3D files, and display them accordingly automatically. Very handy!

Have fun!

I cannot get autoplay to work (Windows 7 64 bits) with a blueray.
I added the autoplay by hitting f5 then configured the options.
I tried Windows autoplay settings and potplayer was configured.
It just would not launch when a blue-ray is inserted.
Am I the only one with this issue?
I looked all over the internet for tips - nothing works so far?

[r0lZ]

I have installed PotPlayer in portable mode here, and therefore it has not registered itself for the autoplay. Sorry, but I can't help.

There is a lot of freeware programs that can add or edit the autoplay entries, like this one. I have never used such programs, but perhaps they will work for PotPlayer.

[r0lZ]

Originally Posted by r0lZ

I will try to find a solution based on the saved palette. But it's without guarantee...

As I wrote above, BDSup2Sub (java and ++) use a fixed 16-colours palette for their conversion to IDX/SUB. By default, they use the internal palette, with a set of reasonable colours. Unfortunately, with some BDs, the default colours are not suitable, and therefore the result looks bad. For example, the shadow of the subtitles may be much more "light" than it should be, or light yellow subtitles are converted to white. That problems have been reported by youli here and by De_Hollander here.

Unfortunately, I can't do much to solve the problem. It is possible to edit the palette to obtain better results, but there are many limitations, and it is impossible to create a palette that will give good results for all BDs. Since it is possible to save the modified palette on disc and to load a previously saved palette from the command line, I have tried to generate the "best" palette, that should work fine with most BDs. I have tried to define 10 different levels of greys (from pure white to pure black) and a few levels of yellow in the remaining slots. But that doesn't work well at all! I have noticed that BDSup2Sub doesn't compare the colours in the palette with the colours of the subtitles to select the best ones, but it assumes always that black is in slot 0, white in slot 1, light grey in slot 2, dark grey in slot 3 and so on. Therefore, if you set, for example, a pure red in slot 1, and white in slot 15, the white subtitles will be converted to red, because BDSup2Sub uses the colours in the slot supposed to contain white, without verifying its content!

As a consequence, it is not possible to define more than 2 shades of greys (plus white and black), and that not sufficient to face all situations that can happen in all BDs. It's really a pity. IMO, the palette should be generated dynamically, according to the content of the source subtitle stream. But it's not the case, and I can't change that. Anyway, due to the difficulties, I have abandoned the idea to generate myself a good palette suitable for the current SUP stream to convert.

However, if you think it is possible to use a better palette for most BDs, you can export a palette, and tells BD3D2MK3D to force BDSup2Sub to use it. It's relatively simple to do. Open BDSup2Sub, go to Edit -> Edit Default DVD Palette, and modify the colours. Do not forget that you should never change completely a colour. For example, to change the yellow, you should modify only the two slots containing the light and dark yellow. Then, export the palette on disc. In BD3D2MK3D, go to tab 2, and add this in the Additional BDSup2Sub Options field:

--palette-file "path\to\Alt_palette.ini"

If you have to convert a lot of subtitles from the same BD (or set of BDs from the same producer), that may be much more easy than having to fix the colours of each .IDX file after the conversion, as explained earlier.

Take care! BDSup2Sub (java version) and BDSup2Sub++ have the same --palette-file option, but the format of the INI file is DIFFERENT for the two programs! (The java version doesn't include the forst slot in the INI: it is always black and cannot be changed. The ++ version includes it, and therefore all subsequent colours are in different slots!) Therefore, if you change the Settings -> BDSup2Sub option, don't forget to change the palette file too!

Summary: To avoid the problem of the bad colours in your subtitles, you can do one of the following:

• Convert only to BD SUP format. (The price to pay is a less good compatibility with some players.)
• Let BD3D2MK3D do its job (without forcing a specific palette), and then verify if the IDX/SUP file have correct colours, and when it's not the case, change them with the Edit DVD Palette option of BDSup2Sub. You will have to do it for all IDX/SUB file that have been converted. (Note that you can do that during the x264 work, as long as the subtitles are modified before the MKV file is created.)
• Force BDSup2Sub to use a modified palette, better for the subtitles BD3D2MK3D has to convert, with the --palette-file option as explained above. The problem is that you need the subtitles to verify if the palette is good, and therefore this method is recommended only when converting several BDs from the same producer, with similar subtitles.

[De_Hollander]

now I had a few blu-ray which the subtitles color palet was immediately good
Jurassic park gave problems with color palet,
I, robot, and 300 rise of an empire not

[r0lZ]

Yes, I know. It's unpredictable.

I am still working on a (possible) solution.

When a subtitle stream must be converted to 3D, it is necessary to convert it to XML/PNG format anyway. I can therefore take any PNG in the set of images that has been generated by BDSup2Sub, and analyse it to get its histogram. Then, I can extract the 3 most used colours from the histogram, verify if they form a shade of greys (or perhaps also yellows), and if it's the case, use them to build a palette dynamically, and use that palette to generate the final 3D VobSub file.

However, there are still several problems.
1. If the user wants the 2D subtitles in VobSub format, there is no need to convert it to XML/PNG, and therefore I have no PNG file to analyse. (IMO, it will be a waste of time to convert to a temp XML/PNG file anyway, just to analyse the colours.)
2. A single subtitle stream may contain subtitles in different colours. For example, some subtitles may be yellow, and others white. Therefore, picking a single PNG is not sufficient to ensure that all colours necessary to convert the whole stream will be suitable. (And analysing all PNGs is too time consuming and too complex.)
3. Even with "good" colours in the available slots of the palette, there is no guarantee that BDSup2Sub will use them correctly. It may still use them blindly, without knowing that they have changed. So, the result is not guaranteed.

However, the method should work relatively well in most cases (when all subtitles of the set use the same black, white and gray or yellow colours).

I may add an option to *try* to generate a better palette automatically for the 3D subtitles in VobSub format, but I still have to do numerous tests to be sure that that will give relatively good results, and of course to be sure that the result will never be worse than with the default palette. Currently, I'm still not convinced.

[De_Hollander]

is there an option in BD3D2mk3d only extract en convert the subs to 3d?
otherwise I have to demux all the streams

[r0lZ]

No. You have to demux the MVC video stream and the subs, then extract the 3D-Planes from the MVC stream (with MVCPlanes.exe available in the toolset directory), and finally convert the subs to 3D (with BD3D2MK3D's Tools menu).

Or just let it do it automatically when you convert the movie to SBS or T&B. BTW, why do you need a separate option to do that? BD3D2MK3D does it automatically anyway.

[frank]

In difficult cases you can simply generate new subtitles.

1. Convert the subtitle file to text .srt with Subtitle Edit. It's not much work for forced subtitles.

2. Generate new sup file with tsMuxer GUI (tools).
Use .srt file as input and demux to .sup.
In tsMuxer you can select font, size, color, shift, border pixels...

3. Replace the sup file in BD3D2MK3D. Generate new 3D subtitles.
____
frank

[r0lZ]

It is also possible to convert the SRT file to SUP directly with Subtitle Edit. The quality is good, although I don't know if there are so many options than with tsMuxer.

But anyway, with your method, you'll get 2D subtitles. De_Hollander wants 3D subs. And, for 3D subs, it is highly recommended to use the original SUP streams from the BD as a basis, because the sizes and positions of the subtitles are very important. They are lost when you convert them to SRT, due to the different font and font size and the fact that the positions are not saved in SRT format.

And to generate the 3D subs with the correct depth, it is necessary to demux the MVC video stream anyway (to get the 3D-Planes) and it is easy to demux the original SUP streams at the same time. Why not use them directly, without the difficult OCR job for converting them to text format? (The OCR of Subtitle Edit is surprisingly good, but errors are unavoidable, and you have to verify all subtitles anyway.)

[De_Hollander]

@frank No that's not good for me, because your subtitles are not in the correct depth and image positions. And cause a strange image 3d ghosting effect, if the subtitle the popout prevented. Therefore, I would simply like to always use BD3D2MK3D

[De_Hollander]

What's the best way to remux only the 3d iso to iso or mkv?

Demux een seamless branching 3d is a problem with tsmuxer.
There is a problem with overlapping like Tangled.
can BD3D2MK3D remux ?

[r0lZ]

No. BD3D2MK3D, as its name implies, is made to convert a BD3D to MK3D, and nothing else.
If you want to do totally other things, please port in the right threads.

[frank]

r0lZ:

But anyway, with your method, you'll get 2D subtitles.

I know, that's why I wrote for difficult (or special) cases (to add words, correcting syntax, colors, borders,...).

Why not use them directly, without the difficult OCR job for converting them to text format?

I normally use it but I had cases where forced subtitles were completely unsatisfactory in my language (e.g. Jurassic Park).
Forced subs are not so many and I can edit every position. Then I only replace the (2D) sup, the rest makes BD3D2MK3D.

Much important: We can create our own srt subtitles and convert into sup with the tools on board of BD3D2MK3D.
Surely this is not for beginners.

[r0lZ]

Right! Of course, if you want to edit the subtitles, it is much easier to edit a SRT file with a text editor than to edit the original bitmaps.

And yes, it is possible to replace the edited subtitles to the right position and with the right depth with the Tools of BD3D2MK3D. But I agree that it's not really easy. I should write a guide to explain how to add external subtitles (or edit an existing stream as you suggest) to the 3D MKV, with (more or less) correct positions and depths. But I haven't much time, and I'm not sure there are many peoples interested in that job.

[sambal]

Recently discovered your program and I love it! Just the thing I've been looking for since I got interest in 3D, about 3 years ago. Especially the 3D subs are very good, I used to use several programs to accomplish this task, including Photoshop to make 3D-T&B out of 2D. Your way is much easier and less time consuming.

I would like to ask you to implement an option to only remux a chapter instead of the whole BD. In my case it would mainly be for test purposes, but others might have other uses for it.