MeGUI freezes while opening d2v file.

[ZikO]

Hello,

I reported similar problem before but thought to blame a DVD. Now, I am pretty sure it's something related to software.

The scenario is this. I ripped a DVD disc by DVDFab using its free version of HDDecrypter to copy a full disc to HDD. Then, I loaded the folder into DVD Shrink 3.2 and re-author the disc, such that I copied separate episodes (Titles) into individual folders. I indexed VOBs by File Indexer in MeGUI and created d2v files + extracted subtitles by VobSub, also in MeGUI.

When I open AVS Creator and try to load d2v files, MeGUI freezes and eventually crashes. I am not that advanced to see where the problem is but this seems to happen when I mix DVDFab with DVD Shrink. Perhaps there is something I miss which can be done to fix this.

I decided to provide this download link, if someone would like to try if this problem occurs on other computers. It's 1.41 GB zip file that contains folder with ripped VOBs and another folder with a d2v file.

Thanks

[hello_hello]

I use MeGUI with d2v files regularly and don't recall ever having an issue with it working properly. DVDShrink is almost always the program I use for re-authoreing, although I tend to open the disk with it and rip and re-author at the same time (AnyDVD decrypting in the background if required) not that it should make any difference.

I started downloading your sample before I realised it was 1.4GB. My internet connection is dog slow. I don't mind downloading a smaller sample, or maybe I can download the one you've already uploaded late tonight, if nobody else is using the internet here. Alternatively I've attached an 8MB zip file containing 8MB worth if DVD video, written by DVDShrink. I can index and open the d2v file without crashing. You might care to try it yourself to see what happens.

If you don't have Avisynth installed, it's a good idea to install it. That way you can open scripts with other software. If MeGUI is using it's own portable version of Avisynth and the standard Avisynth isn't currently installed, you can't do that. You might need to index the DVD with DGIndex yourself. It's located in the MeGUI\tools\dgindex folder. Run DGIndex.exe and use the File/Open menu, followed by the File/Save Project menu, although I assume the indexing is working normally but it's the opening of the d2v file that's the problem. If you want to create a script for testing with another program, just start with something like this, changing the location of DGDecode.dll and the d2v file as required.

LoadPlugin("C:\Program Files\MeGUI\tools\dgindex\DGDecode.dll")
DGDecode_mpeg2source("E:\testing\VTS_01_1.d2v")

It wouldn't hurt to check MeGUI's log file right after it crashes. It may provide a clue as to the cause, depending on how much of it was written before MeGUI crashed.
After typing all that..... have you tried restarting MeGUI and the PC? It probably won't be a magic fix, but it can't hurt to try. Occasionally MeGUI offers me a "there's no such function" error message because the required Avisynth plugin stopped loading for no apparent reason, but a restart always fixes that one.

[ZikO]

Hi hello_hello

Thanks for your answer.

I have also been using DVD Shrink and it has been really good program with some occasional exceptions if DVD discs were well protected. I realised this might happen when I use DVDFab for ripping and then DVD Shrink for customizing--extracting titles, captions, or audio etc. I did try to restart comp and restart MeGUI but the problem remains. The same files were causing MeGUI to freeze. I also tried your Vob test and it's working all right. Other old DVDs which were not been ripped by DVDFab but DVD Shrink work as well.

I also opened DGIndex from a MeGUI folder and indexed VOB manually from there. The video was not fully indexed; significant part at the end of the movie was cut out.

Because the file was too big to download, I have removed the link and tried to rip only one chapter using DVD Shrink. It would be only ~200MB but when I indexed a VOB file from a chapter and uploaded it, this time MeGUI worked. If I rip the whole move, MeGUI freezes.


EDIT. I extracted episodes using MainMovie function in DVDFab and extracted episodes into separate folders. MeGUI seems to work now but I had to manually set delay of audio.

I cannot say more because I encoding file into h264. I will see how it ends

[LigH.de]

The most important pre-requirement for DGMPGDec is that you don't use it on a whole VIDEO_TS folder as it was authored on DVD, but only on an extracted PGC with the movie to be converted (and with only one video angle, in the rare case you may have a multi-angle movie).

If you did not yet rip the DVD disk, first set up your favourite ripper to extract only the main movie according to the logical structures called "Program Chains" stored in the IFO files (e.g. DVD Decrypter calls it "IFO mode"). If you already ripped the whole DVD, you can use PGCDemux to extract the main movie's PCG. You can either store it as a continuous "PGC VOB" without 1 GB segmentation, or enable stream processing and store the video stream as raw *.m2v and the audio stream(s) in addition, with delay values in their file names.

If you used DVD Shrink to re-author a minimal "movie only" DVD, this may be one exception where your DVD copy contains only one PGC (and one angle) anyway, so DGMPGDec could work with it directly (just extracting the audio streams), no need to reduce it even more.

[ZikO]

Thanks for the response guys.

I did a couple of things, yesterday.

I used DVDShrink on the folder where I have copied the whole DVD disc by DVDFab with option set to copy the whole VOBs in one file. I opened VOBs in DGIndex manually which has successfully indexed files. MeGUI did not complain. Almost everything was working. There were two problems: interlaced videos and huge delay around 4.5 sec between video and audio. Thanks to VLC I could manage to find the proper time and set it in MeGUI but I was surprised by the interlace.

I installed DVDFab Passkey which decrypt DVD on the fly and then processed a disc using DVD Decrypter with the IFO option--DVD Shrink could not open a disc processed by DVD Passkey. I extracted individual episodes and manually converted them to d2v by DGIndex. MeGUI did not complain. The videos were correct and without interlace but audio and video was still out of sync. It was only 1.75 sec but still that's quite a lot. I sorted out the non-synchronization problem and now the video are correctly converted to h.254.

I think I stick to DVD Passkey and DVD Decrypter. It seems to work better.

Thanks.

PS. MeGUI gives me the annoying warning regarding setting different delay between video and audio when the time of delay is different from expected. When I say expected, I mean the delay suggested by MeGUI. Is possible to get rid of it?

[LigH.de]

I wonder why you don't use DVD Decrypter on its own. It should be able to decrypt and process most DVDs without the help of even more software; instead, "too many cooks spoil the broth"...

Also I wonder why you complain about interlacing. I guess you got Telecine NTSC material, and DGMPGDec may handle pulldown flags or IVTC only when the video is correctly flagged after extraction.

[ZikO]

I wonder why you don't use DVD Decrypter on its own. It should be able to decrypt and process most DVDs without the help of even more software; instead, "too many cooks spoil the broth"...

I knew one would come and ask why not to use the simplest approach. The whole point of "too many cooks" is that something which normally works has not worked. There are a couple of discs DVD Shrink cannot open. While DVD Decrypter handle them, it uses a mode called "brute". I tried to copy just one disc and it took ages!

Also I wonder why you complain about interlacing. I guess you got Telecine NTSC material, and DGMPGDec may handle pulldown flags or IVTC only when the video is correctly flagged after extraction.

The original video format is progressive. I am 100% sure about it! Although I know how to handle interlaced Telecine NTSC material, I just feel it is not right if an original material becomes interlaced after processing. It loses it's quality which I would like to avoid. I might be a little bit too peculiar, I agree.

[LigH.de]

Well, there seem to be evil copy protections, designed specifically to confuse Windows PCs. But consumer DVD players don't use any different drives, therefore they must be "compatible enough" or not even a consumer DVD player could play them. And good DVD rippers will try to read a DVD Video disc as similar as possible to a consumer player. Sometimes it confuses me as well why such hard copy protection features can exist at all... The most reliable way to handle complicated discs can sometimes be to try to read a whole ISO (or MDS) disc image, which will then be unprotected, so you can mount it in a virtual CD/DVD drive (like Daemon Tools), and any DVD ripper should be able to work from this virtual disc. Even if decrypting will take a while on this, the image file can then be used several times very fast. And to check if the image was read successfully, play it with a software DVD player.

Regarding NTSC: Of course, progressive video is easier to compress with modern video codecs, retains more quality. But NTSC DVDs may contain such material in two different kinds: Either "soft telecine" (which is in fact encoded as progressive video, 24/1.001 fps, and the player will apply Telecine for NTSC CRT TV sets) or "hard telecine" (which is encoded already with Telecine, 30/1.001 fps, but DGMPGDec can detect it and apply IVTC while decoding to restore progressive frames, but only if it detects the flags correcty).