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  1. Hi guys,

    as you can see from the attached image, I'd want to change this DVD from "A" to "B".
    In "A", movie is the first thing played.
    I want to add a custom menu (First Play) with two buttons so that I can choose which set of menus to land on and start the playback from there.
    Of course the audio track should be preset accordingly to the menu (English -> English, Italian -> Italian).
    The little boxes under Main Menu are Chapters, Audio, Extras, etc...

    Any idea on how to achieve that?
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  2. Member Cornucopia's Avatar
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    Sure, it's possible. Think about what happens once the movie plays - where should it go next? (all contingencies). This is the sort of thing where one can make good use out of the GPRM and SPRM DVD player memory registers.

    Scott
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  3. Member DB83's Avatar
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    Schema A looks odd anyway.

    It implies that a menu is only reached after the movie plays (or during it). And how could you preselect alternative menus in that scenario ?

    u_q is correct. But you could always force back to the custom menu after the movie plays if you do not want to mess around with registers.

    The custom button would set the language track and then branch to the alternative menu.

    But is this your own composition or an already authored dvd and you want to retain all existing menus etc. ?
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  4. Member Cornucopia's Avatar
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    What's "u_q"?

    @OP, what authoring tools do you use? Some can do that easily, some with difficulty, some not at all.

    Scott
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  5. Member DB83's Avatar
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    Sorry Scott. Had a 'blonde' moment
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  6. I'm a Super Moderator johns0's Avatar
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    Would be easier to have one choice for language change rather than choose 2 different options for language choice.
    I think,therefore i am a hamster.
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  7. If the movie plays all the way through and then at the end presents you with the choice of English or Italian menus, what you want to accomplish is easily done using PGCEdit. There's even a guide:

    http://download.videohelp.com/r0lZ/pgcedit/third_party/blutach/How_to_use_PgcEdit_new_macro.htm

    But maybe I have it wrong as your left pic is somewhat misleading about what's going on.
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  8. @DB83
    how could you preselect alternative menus in that scenario?
    I can't. The player chooses one menu or the other according to how user preferences are set (I mean in the player itself).
    It is an existing DVD. I don't like how it is authored so I want to change it the way I like.

    @Scott
    I don't want to reauthor the DVD, only modify it.
    If I didn't get your question correctly please ask again.

    @manono
    I know that guide, it's not what I want.
    The DVD starts playing the movie (language pre-selected according to the preferences set in the player) then at the end it goes to the Main Menu (which one? Again according to the player settings).
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  9. Member DB83's Avatar
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    I must be missing something.

    I have never seen a player 'pre-select' anything for alternative playback.

    Surely the disk itself controls the playback. The coding of the disk could set some registers to suggest that it is the player that is in control. But, practically, the disk has full control.

    BTW what disk is this ?
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  10. Member Cornucopia's Avatar
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    In the absence of pre-selection commands authored on the disc, the "default" (as chosen in the player's settings) is pre-selected.

    @Instant Martian, modifying a DVD structure IS re-authoring it. Maybe not from scratch, but that's what it's doing. Many times, doing it in an authoring app from scratch is the quickest and/or most foolproof way. You could modify the structure after-the-fact using tools like IFOEdit, PGCEdit, but those have learning curves just like authoring apps do. There are others (I just wrote a list about this very thing in a thread yesterday, IIRC).

    Scott
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  11. @DB83
    Ice Age 2 (R2 Italian release).

    @Scott
    I am sorry.
    I usually use the term "re-authoring" when I dismantle an existing DVD and use the elementary streams to build a new DVD.
    Anyway, I am familiar (medium level) with DVD-Lab and (beginner level) PGCEdit.
    IFOEdit is out of my league (especially since it seems impossible to find a decent guide).
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  12. Member Cornucopia's Avatar
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    Considering the change that you are intending (making the movie NOT 1st play, adding an overview/main menu which IS first play, putting main movie as option for title/language menu), I think it would actually be easier for you to deconstruct to raw elements and re-author from scratch. The menus are going to have to look different and have different options on them, so you'll need new menus anyway (unless I misunderstood).

    Scott
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  13. - making the movie NOT 1st play: right
    - adding an overview/main menu which IS first play: right
    - putting main movie as option for title/language menu: uhm... I beg your pardon?
    I don't get exactly what do you mean, I just want to reach a chosen main menu (English or Italian) instead of getting to the movie right away.
    Once in the Main Menu I (think) can access to the sub-menus or start the movie playback.
    Rebuild the whole thing from scratch would be a p.i.t.a., there are extras and animated menus.
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  14. Member Cornucopia's Avatar
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    OK, skip that part (option/language). I may have misunderstood.

    But, you've got a lot of unfinished business in that graphic. What are those boxes about? They can/will affect what gets played when/how.

    I would suggest you create a complete flowchart with listings for all buttons on each menu and their destination/result, and then the destination/result of what happens once that destination is finished. A "round trip", if you will.

    You can load your ripped DVD in PGCEdit and run through all those links to see what actually is happening. You'll need that info down the road.

    Scott
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  15. Member DB83's Avatar
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    Hmm.

    As far as the disk is concerned, there seems no logic in letting the movie play BEFORE you choose any elements. Since you mention the player, there must be some obscure setting there that allows you to skip the menus. I know that some self-recorded disks have this behaviour but a commercial release ?
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  16. @Scott
    Those boxes are menus I can reach from the Main Menu (Language/Sub Menu, Extra Menu, Chapters Menu). It was written in post #1.
    I would suggest you create a complete flowchart
    It seems a lot of work...

    @DB83
    As far as the disk is concerned, there seems no logic in letting the movie play BEFORE you choose any elements.
    Apparently not all DVD authors think this way.
    Also I am pretty sure this isn't the first time I see a (commercial) DVD authored this way (very few but more than one).
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  17. Member Alex_ander's Avatar
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    You can create an extra VTS with your menu only (as a part of a separate DVD) then using DVDRemake or PGCEdit add that VTS to your DVD and edit commands for the desired navigation:
    a) ensure that a command in the First Play PGC lead to the new VTS#'s root menu;
    b) button commands in your new menu must lead to a PGC in VMG, having pre-commands leading to one of the original menus; you'll need to explore the movie PGC's post-commands to guess which commands to use in VMG for going there.

    That might be enough in a simple case, but sometimes there are extra commands in the original playback order, preventing bypass of FBI warning etc. - this needs extra editing.
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  18. @Alex_ander
    thanks for your tip but it looks like an extra level of complexity to me.

    I managed to draw a more complete scheme of the DVD (it is pretty crowded so I left some self-explanatory links out).
    This is only half of the layout, each menu has a double in English.
    I can blank the trailers at the top with VobBlanker but I want to keep everything else.
    My goal is (would be) to put a 2-button menu over "Studio Intro" to go to a specific set of menus (and have the language set accordingly in the process), so that the play back is:
    Custom menu -> Studio Intro -> Main Menu -> whatever...
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  19. If I understand correctly the last chart, the two menus have already a button leading to the main movie, and therefore you don't need to add one. Right? (It's not clear in scenario A of your first pic.)

    So, basically, you want to do two things:
    1. Add a little menu to select the "language" of the menu (to jump to menu A or B freely) instead of being automatically directed to a specific menu according to the player's settings
    2. Jump to the menu directly when the disc is inserted (rather than to the movie)

    It is usually very simple do do point 2, with PgcEdit's Jump to PGC Upon DVD Insert macro. But since you want to create a new selection menu that is played before the existing menus, point 1 must be done first. Obviously, you will have to create your selection menu first, for example with DVD Lab Pro, and insert it somewhere in the original DVD. (If there are already menus in all VTSs, you will have to import a new dummy VTS with a short cell (that you can blank with PgcEdit/FixVTS), and then import the selection menu in that VTS.)

    Since currently the authoring selects automatically the main menu for you, it must have a way to decide which menu to use. There are two totally different methods to do that. Either the menu has (at least) two "language units" (in short "LU"), or the decision is taken with VM commands that analyse the SPRMs related to the language configuration of the player.

    In the first case, the LU corresponding to the player setting "Preferred menu language" (stored in SPRM 0) is automatically selected. (Or the first LU is selected if your preferred menu language is different than the languages of the LUs.) It is not possible to force the player to jump to another menu without manually modifying the player's preferences, and reloading the DVD. However, with PgcEdit, you can create a new VTS and import the original menu in that new VTS, so that you will have two identical menus, with 2 LUs in each menu. Now, you can remove the second LU in the original menu, and remove the first LU of the new menu. You have now 2 menus with a single menu, and you can force the player to use one menu or the other one with additional jump commands. But it's a very difficult thing to do, because usually the main menu is in the same VTS than the main movie, and it is easy, for example, to jump from the chapters menu to the right chapter in the main movie directly. Since the second menu is not in the same VTS any more, you'll have to bounce through new dummy PGCs in the VMGM each time the menu has to jump to the main VTS, or return from the main VTS to the new menu. Such modifications can be a pain to do, especially if there are many jumps to modify. And note also that there is no way to jump directly to a chapter from another VTS, and if you have t do that or similar things, you will have to use GPRMs and a lot of new pre-commands in the main movie PGC to jump to the right chapter. As you can see, the re-authoring of your original dual-LU menu to two single menus can be extremely difficult and long, and if your DVD is authored that way, I strongly suggest to reauthor it completely from scratch.

    The DVD can also have been authored more simply. The main menu can be already "duplicated" in the same VTSM domain. For example, the main menu page can be present in two different PGCs of the same LU. In that case, it's a navigation command that selects the right PGC to jump to, according to a SPRM value (or to a GPRM previously set to a specific value dependent of a SPRM). In that case, it is theoretically sufficient to find the command(s) that determine the menu language to use. To do that, the command must read a SPRM containing your preferred language. That can be SPRM 0 (preferred menu language), or SPRM 16 (preferred audio language) or even SPRM 18 (preferred subtitle language). So, you have to search the DVD for the occurrences of these SPRMs, and analyse what they do. If you are lucky, you will easily find some commands that read the SPRM and initialise a GPRM with a value that will be used later to decide to what menu the nav must be directed. When you have located that code, it is theoretically sufficient to replace it to a jump to a new selection menu that will initialise the same GPRM with identical values, but based on the button that has been pressed by the user rather than on the content of a SPRM. That's the easiest case to handle.

    If the same GPRM is checked again and again each time the nav has to select a menu (and there is no GPRM used for that purpose), than you will have to initialise an unused GPRM in the selection menu, and replace the SPRM in the original commands with your GPRM. That should be also easy to do, but you will have to do many modifications. And, you will have to find where the selection menu must be called. This usually easy to do using the trace. In your case, since the movie is still played first, you will have to insert the menu somewhere after the playback of the movie and before reaching the existing menu. Take care: the same menu must be called when the Root menu button of the remote is pressed during the playback of the movie, and that route is not necessarily identical than the route taken by the post-commands of the movie. In that case, you will have to call the selection menu from two different locations. That may be in the RootM entry of the menu of the current VTS, and/or elsewhere.

    (BTW, you haven't said if you want to be able to select the menu to jump to each time it is called, or if you want your selection menu to show up only once, when the DVD is inserted. In the second case, of course the menu can be called almost immediately, even from the first-play PGC. You have to decide.)

    When the menu is finished and works as expected, you can skip the playback of the main movie easily, with a call to "Jump to PGC upon DVD insert", and jump directly to your new selection menu. Bot note that that will also skip the intro clips and previews. If you don't want that, you'll have to analyse the flow yourself with the trace, and you will have to detect when the nav takes the decision to jump to the movie, and replace that code with a jump to the menu. That may be difficult however, because it is possible that some important commands initialising stull will be skipped. So, if you do it manually, be sure to verify carefully.

    It's a long explanation, but it's not as complex as ti sounds (except if your 2 menus are authored in different LUs). I can't be more precise, because I don't know your DVD, but you should get the idea. If you understand what you are doing, the modifications should be relatively easy to do. Good luck!
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  20. Thank you for your extensive reply, I have to take my time and read it very carefully (though I am beginning to think this modification is beyond my skills).

    (BTW, you haven't said if you want to be able to select the menu to jump to each time it is called, or if you want your selection menu to show up only once, when the DVD is inserted. In the second case, of course the menu can be called almost immediately, even from the first-play PGC. You have to decide.)
    I didn't get this question.
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  21. I mean, when the nav returns to the menu after having played the movie or a bonus, do you want the possibility to choose again what menu you want to show, or the selection of the menu to show must be globally set only once when the DVD starts? Of course, the navigation is different in the two cases.
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  22. Just once at the beginning.
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  23. Good. That's easier.

    Anyway, begin to verify if the menu is authored as two LUs, or as multiple PGCs in the same LU.
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  24. I need some time.
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  25. English Main Menu is VTSM 1, LU 1, PGC 1.
    Italian Main Menu is VTSM 1, LU 2, PGC 1.
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  26. So, as I have explained, it's the worst case. You will have to split the menu, and "re-link" it. That means probably that you'll have to create a lot of new commands to jump to the two parts of the menu. It's a big and difficult job, and unfortunately, I can't help much without the IFOs and the menu.

    A VTSM menu can be accessed only through the "entry menu PGSs": (the RootM, AudioM, SubpicM, AngleM and ChapterM PGCs). So, if, say, you keep the LU 1 (English) in the original VTSM 1 domain (and copy LU 2 in a new VTS as explained previously), the RootM PGC of the remaining LU (the English menu) will still be called when the user presses the RootM button on the remote during the playback of a title in VTST 1. So, at the beginning of the RootM menu of VTS 1, you will have to insert new commands that test if the GPRM set by the selection menu has the value for the English or Italian, and if it's Italian, you will have to jump to a dummy in the VMGM, and from that dummy, you have to bounce to the RootM of the Italian menu in the new VTS. Repeat for the other entry menu PGCs (if any), and the Italian menu will be called when it should.

    But that works only for calls from the VMG or VTST domains to the menu. You will also have to fix all jumps from the Italian menu to the original titles in VTST 1, again through new dummies in the VMGM. That may be much more difficult, especially if there are jumps to specific chapters, because you cannot jump from a menu in the new VTS to a chapter in VTST 1 directly, and you'll have to redo the logic of the chapter menu calls.

    All that stuff is not easy. Honestly, I wonder why you want to split the original menu in two parts, one for each language. I suppose that you can understand both languages, if you want to be able to access both menus. So, what will be the benefit for you? (Some times, the menu in a specific language has additional bonuses, not present in the other menu, because they are available only in one language. Of course it's a good reason to split the menus, but that case is very rare.)

    Also, remember that changing the "preferred menu language" option in your player from English to Italian or vice-versa will automatically switch to the other menu, without having to modify the DVD. Although that may not be as convenient as a selection menu, that works well and it's much more easy to do that having to split the two LUs and to create a new selection menu. (However, afaik, there is no way to change that setting in software players running on your PC. They use always the language of your region or OS. Of course, you can change that setting with PgcEdit, to test if both menus work as expected, but PgcEdit is not a player.)
    Last edited by r0lZ; 12th Sep 2014 at 04:02.
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  27. Honestly, I wonder why you want to split the original menu in two parts, one for each language.
    Maybe I am misunderstanding what you mean or maybe I didn't make myself clear enough: I don't want to split the menu, there are two sets of menus already. But again, maybe I am misunderstanding.

    Anyway, it seems a very tricky work to do (I think beyond my current skills).
    Let's say I give up the Italian menu(s) completely (keeping Italian audio and subs, naturally), would it be any easier?
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  28. You need to split the menu in two parts if you want to be able to access the English or Italian menu via VM commands. Anyway, indeed, it's very complicated for a very tiny advantage: just see the menu buttons in another language.

    Yes, keeping only the English menu is extremely simple. Just right-click on any PGC of the VTSM 1 menu, and select remove LU. Follow the instructions.
    After that, to regain the disc space, you should also process the VTSM 1 VOB with FixVTS.

    Jumping to the menu directly upon DVD insert (your second will) is easy. Just use the Jump to PGC upon DVD insert menu, and follow the instructions. (Note that you will ship also the previews, studio logos, FBI warnings and and the crap that is usually played when a DVD is inserted. You can therefore also blank that PGCs and remove them from the VOB files with FixVTS if you want to regain the disc space.)
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  29. Ok, I'll do some tests asap.
    As always, thanks for your time and help.
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  30. It doesn't work.
    If I trace the DVD I get a "Target not found" error at the end of the movie playback.
    I think I'll leave the disc as it is and live with it.
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