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  1. Far too goddamn old now EddyH's Avatar
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    Hiya...
    my original post on the subtitle forum has devolved into this issue, so I thought I'd ask here as well.

    I'm using DVDAuthor (via DVDAuthorGUI) and a gaggle of the other usual freeware suspects. I've made a from-scratch DVD (including the filming etc) that, for reasons that are too inane to go into, may need to be shown on ALL of 16:9 anamorphic, 4:3 letterbox and 4:3 pan-scan players - this is, at the present time, non-negotiable. Therefore it needs to have both subtitles and menu subpics to match.

    I think I've cracked the subtitles (maybe), but I can't for the life of me get anything but the Widescreen set of menu buttons into it. Hence they're horizontally off on PS displays and vertically on LB. In fact, even altering what DVDAG puts for them tends to leave me with trouble inserting my new version (into DVDSubEdit, at the moment), leaving the whole think blank and the program being strange, even after tweaking the IFOs so that it should be looking for separate subpic streams rather than just one. I've happily made up the new set, put them as suitable colours and resized them properly, but can I get them to go into the project and to work? Nah.
    (which obviously means even if the 4:3 screens are set to use just one or other of the adaptions, it's still going to be broken, because I can no more add 2 modes than I can 3; my only recourse is to use non-widescreen menus, which I'm reserving as the ultimate fallback)

    Is there an established method for this, or a particular program to use (...and does it need to be bought?), etc? If not, any DVD eggheads that have ideas of what to do?

    Already had good help in the subbing forum but thought I'd open this up to a wider audience than a subsection of authoring

    Thanks
    -= She sez there's ants in the carpet, dirty little monsters! =-
    Back after a long time away, mainly because I now need to start making up vidcapped DVDRs for work and I haven't a clue where to start any more!
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  2. Free Flying Soul liquid217's Avatar
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    I replied to your other thread, but I guess this one would have been more appropriate:
    I haven't read this entire thread, but I have noticed that you are trying to produce a 16:9 menu using DVDAuthorGUI. Although DVDAuthorGUI does allow you to create and import 16:9 m2v's for your menu. The Pan/Scan, and letterbox modes will not show up correctly on the menu, do to the fact that 2 other sets of buttons must be generated. I have tried to work on getting this compliant for 16:9 menus, but have been unsuccessful. I have even had one user email me his project files (bmps, xml, scripts, etc) where he was able to get spumux to correctly mux the modified BMPs into the vob container. Although it worked in his example, I was not able to reproduce this systematically (inside my GUI, in other words). To be honest, there is very little in the dvdauthor man pages on the subject, and none of the other open source frontends seem to support either; so it will be next to impossible for me to integrate it into the GUI (at least at this time).
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  3. It is possible with GUI for dvdauthor, but all 3 modes ( 16:9 anamorphic, 4:3 letterbox and 4:3 pan-scan) only if you select MuxMan as authoring engine.
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  4. Far too goddamn old now EddyH's Avatar
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    Liquid: Ah! The author of that fine utility. I hope you haven't taken any of this badly
    What you say knocks me back a bit though - I was about to go off and see if I could address DVDAuthor directly and force it to do this. Been doing enough deep-level scripting for other things recently after all, it'd just be "one more thing". But if you can't work it out even when writing a program to interface with it, then... damn.
    (Still, I'll have a look - extra pair of eyes and all that).

    Don't suppose you've got those example files about at all? At least, the text side of them, or even the concept they were working on. Can make my own BMPs etc.

    Borax: Ah, another thing I was going to try was the "alternate muxer" thing, but I still haven't figured out what all the options actually meant.... hang on... wait.... *peers closely* ... that's a different program isn't it. OK, which one of you made their program first? The other is going to have to change their util's name, I'm sorry, it's too confusing

    (So muxman CAN do it? I couldn't see my way clear to convincing it to make menu screens, only subbed video streams, even though they're conceptually the same thing. Maybe I am, once again, missing something fundamental and obvious? That or it only works for CLI mode.)
    -= She sez there's ants in the carpet, dirty little monsters! =-
    Back after a long time away, mainly because I now need to start making up vidcapped DVDRs for work and I haven't a clue where to start any more!
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  5. Free Flying Soul liquid217's Avatar
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    Yes, DVDAuthorGUI is a different utility. PM me your email address, and I will forward you that email.
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  6. Far too goddamn old now EddyH's Avatar
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    Hmm - maybe in a bit

    I've just tried GFDVDA and... well, it's kinda baffling I must say. But it has turned me on to the idea of maybe trying to use Muxman with an instruction script - if i can't get DVDAuthor to play nice in the same way, or GFDVDA, etc.

    (I think it may actually be a fundamental weakness in the muxing engine dvd author uses that stops this from being possible - it just accepts one subpic stream and pastes it into all three modes with no option to add more, as far as i can see from the manual)

    I mean, apart from that, my menus are quite simple. Just rectangles around words, that go to chapters (or other menus) with the subs turned on or off.

    However I think I need the weekend off. I've done a very cut down version of my thing in GFD (or more precisely GFMM), after tinkering and sort of getting a feel for the bizarre way in which it works. About to test-play... let's see.

    edit: well, I found the temp dir first. it's definitely got interim bitmaps that reflect where I put the buttons... and they exist in 3 versions... a middling one, one that's vertically compressed from it, and one horizontally stretched... so that's a good start (can't properly test it on the PC so I'm going to have to sacrifice a DVDRW to the gods of confusion
    edit2: well... the intro video works, buttons are there, in the style and position i expected, and the navigation goes sort of where i thought it would (even though it's not yet where I WANT it to be). dunno if it has actually compensated for aspect, but should find out soon enough. subtitles aren't working for some reason but can maybe jigger that to work later. Thanks for the tipoff at least - this may finally lead to a resolution.
    Last edited by EddyH; 23rd Apr 2010 at 12:22.
    -= She sez there's ants in the carpet, dirty little monsters! =-
    Back after a long time away, mainly because I now need to start making up vidcapped DVDRs for work and I haven't a clue where to start any more!
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    Scroll to the post on making a 16:9 menu with MuxMan and a script.
    I tested it on a widescreen and standard TV and the subpics lined up ok.

    http://forum.doom9.org/showthread.php?t=99306
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  8. Far too goddamn old now EddyH's Avatar
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    Yep - my menus now all work "OK", or at least what happens in the player mirrors what I did in the GUI! But something else strange has happened........
    1/ I can't get ANY subtitles. Might be something in my hurried mashing-together of it all with no post-editing though. It's probably fixable?
    2/ MY VIDEO ONLY WORKS IN LETTERBOX OR WIDESCREEN. I can NOT get my home player to display it as pan-scan at all (haven't had chance to test with the "corporate" one). AAAAAH! If only this had happened earlier! Does this mean you CAN still force a player set to "PS" to display videos as LB just by setting modes on the disk?
    (if "yes", then... SONOFAB*eeeep*................)
    -= She sez there's ants in the carpet, dirty little monsters! =-
    Back after a long time away, mainly because I now need to start making up vidcapped DVDRs for work and I haven't a clue where to start any more!
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  9. Free Flying Soul liquid217's Avatar
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    Is there actually a software dvd player that will display the pan&scan/letterbox modes correctly? I think that was my biggest problem working on the modification, that I would have to drag my old 27" crt tv/dvd player out to even test it.
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  10. 1/ I can't get ANY subtitles. Might be something in my hurried mashing-together of it all with no post-editing though. It's probably fixable?
    More or less everything is 'fixable', only the effort varies...
    Do you get any error messages in the log?
    Does this mean you CAN still force a player set to "PS" to display videos as LB just by setting modes on the disk?
    It still depends on the player. Some players ignore all kinds of settings (including forced subs, uops...)
    But usually, yes. The restriction is my own oppinion about PS... I don't like it!
    You can change it in the mxp file (activate the 'Edit author.xml file before DVD creation process' box in the default project settings)
    Then change
    Code:
    Section=Content
    {
        Item=Segment
        {
            Name=Segment_1
            Display Mode=Only Letterbox
    to
    Code:
    Section=Content
    {
        Item=Segment
        {
            Name=Segment_1
            Display Mode=P/S and LB
    for all Segments (within the menu-segments this setting is already used if you have activated both modes)

    BUT: If you want/need subtitles you need probably different subtitles for the PS mode. This is not directly supported in GfD. You can change the mxp file manually to use such additional subtitles, but as I said in the first answer: The effort varies...
    Last edited by borax; 27th Apr 2010 at 06:59.
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  11. Far too goddamn old now EddyH's Avatar
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    Heh, well I'm not promoting making pan-scan videos as a valid lifestyle choice either. But sometimes you have to take one for the team if there's no other way
    Forgot the disc in my home player so I STILL haven't got to test it in the machine that started all the aggro. Which I guess I'll have to now there's the "it may just ignore it" caveat.

    MXP files, ergh, more learning! But at least it seems to be pretty well documented and no more cryptic than DVDA's XML (and certainly not as bad as IFO), so it's more a matter of getting my head around precisely what I want it to do rather than understanding how to. Difficult, as my mind operates like a computer with very little RAM or swap space... thanks for the head start on the code!

    Re: the subs --- yeah, I've made it work before, so really what I meant was "it's almost certainly fixable". Just it'll require either fixing errors in what I fed to GfD (i think the actual source files for two of the streams were broken, and probably took out the third one with them), and/or a bit of mucking about with muxman/pgcedit/ifoedit/vobblanker etc. This is how I managed to stuff different versions into it before - add multiple streams, then rejig the IFO files so that there's only one master stream (my own term, I have no idea what it's properly called) but it points to the substreams (x20,21,22) as aspect variants of the same language. I'm prepared to do that bit!

    Liquid: yeah, it's a bit like that. I'm discovering this stuff on standalone players pretty much because the PC-based ones are crap.
    The main one we have here is Cyberlink PowerDVD, which DID seem OK, until I discovered that a/ it tends to ignore disc ops to turn the subtitles on/off (but.. not ALL the time.. argh), preferring to make you use its own rightclick menu, b/ it DOES respond to pan-scan, when you set it to overzoom a video, but IN THE WRONG DIRECTION, c/ it renders the subs THEN zooms/panscans. Useful to see if they fit horizontally within a certain frame when the file hasn't got PS in it, not so good for actually reading, checking the vertical - or anything at all when it DOES have PS data.
    Also installed as an alternative is Nero Showtime. I haven't been able to get it to successfully load and run without hanging more than about 1 in 5 times, and not at all recently, so I can't even comment on whether it works with my advanced features. However now I've said that, I realise I haven't tried it on my home Nero, which is both a/ not OEM (yes, I bought a full copy with my laptop's external DVD writer!), b/ a different version, which makes a shocking amount of difference for Ahead's products vs, say, Microsoft.
    Media player... haahahahaha!
    Winamp - I don't think it even DOES dvds? Ditto quicktime.
    VLC, er... I forgot about it. It worked ok on the basic version. However I haven't got my hopes up, seeing as the DVD playing part is probably a bolt-on to a program initially meant to serve AVIs over a network.
    Realplayer may be just fine for DVDs, but I hate it so much for every other reason I'll crawl over hot coals to avoid using it.

    SEVEN-YEAR-ITCH EDIT: Liquid did PM me shortly after this, however thanks to various "life" issues I didn't get the message until, well, a couple months ago... There was a new version attached... it's probably massively obsolete now. But that conclusion was at least reached, and I thank them for the effort, even though I never got to try it.
    Somewhere, that particular DVD lies abandoned, along with a bunch of other projects from the time that ended up being ashcanned just because there was far too many of them and not enough time, money, computrons or personal energy to deal with them all (it's not like it was actually my idea to pile them all up anyway). Thankfully nowadays we have a different guy whose specific job is dealing with lecture/seminar/etc video recording and online hosting, so it's all pretty moot.
    Last edited by EddyH; 4th May 2017 at 05:12. Reason: didn't want to bump the thread but felt a postscript was in order
    -= She sez there's ants in the carpet, dirty little monsters! =-
    Back after a long time away, mainly because I now need to start making up vidcapped DVDRs for work and I haven't a clue where to start any more!
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  12. Free Flying Soul liquid217's Avatar
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    Ok, I'm taking another stab at it, and I have compiled a test release. I have tried authoring a test dvd with a widescreen menu, and it plays back fine in VLC, powerdvd, and MPC. (Which it did before anyway). I plan to get my old tv/dvd player out over the weekend and try it on that, but if there are any brave souls that would like to test the new version, PM or email me.
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