Dealing with VOBs, subtitles, Sizzle and Miyu

[silverspell]

This is a bit long, but I hope it's reasonably coherent. Please forgive any newbie blunders!

I have some DVDs of public domain films, from which I'd like to assemble a few compilation DVDs for my parents. As authored VOBs, most of the films are no more than 1.2 GB or so in size, so I can fit two or three on a standard DVD-R without doing any reauthoring. So far, so good.

The source discs don't have CSS, and so I was able to just copy the VOB files to my hard drive. I don't have Toast, so I looked into open-source and shareware options, and Sizzle 0.5 seemed to be my best choice to put multiple movies on a single disc. Sizzle wanted to see each movie as a single file, so I used D-Vision 3 to combine the multiple VOBs for each movie into a single VOB. I then put together a reasonable-looking menu structure, and things seemed to work OK. I didn't need to demux/remux anything, which is obviously nice.

The image I created seems to work, but the one catch is that there's apparently no way for Sizzle to create menus that highlight the currently selected option. Is there any way to fix this? I tried navigating through the DVD image I made, but navigating "blind" -- i.e. being unable to tell which menu item I had selected -- was a real pain in the neck. I can't imagine my parents dealing with that.

Now, I also wanted to put together some subtitle tracks, since the sound is often lousy and it'd be a nice thing to do for my parents. Plus some of these movies are hilarious, and it's always better to have subs so that you don't have to hold back your laughter for fear of obscuring the dialogue!

From recommendations on this forum, I downloaded Miyu, and did a couple trial runs with small .mpg files I had around. Everything seemed to work -- I was able, at least, to export .srt files that made sense. Further problems soon ensued, however.

First of all, Sizzle wants to see ".sub" files, which are muxed collections of images, but Miyu only seems to export text-file-based formats like .srt. Is there a program that'll convert .srt to .sub, or another smart way to give Sizzle what it needs? Or is ffmpegX the only (free) game in town?

(But if I use ffmpegX, how do I get my two movies on one disc with chapters and menus? I'm not seeing how to do any of that with ffmpegX.)

Furthermore, I'm not having any luck figuring out how to play my VOB files in Miyu. It doesn't appear to support VOBs, so I tried doing a straight convert to MPEG-2, but that didn't seem to work either -- Miyu kept acting like it would open the file, but doing nothing. (Well, one thing: the UI was slowing down dramatically, as if a crash were imminent, until I selected a different file).

Does Miyu require that $20 QuickTime Pro MPEG-2 plug-in that I keep reading about? Is there a quick way to get Miyu to play my VOB, or do I have to transcode to a different format just to have a scratch copy for doing my subs? That's a hassle if so. Right now I've got ffmpegX transcoding to .avi mpeg4, so we'll see if Miyu will accept that.

And generally, is there a more elegant way to do any of this? What I want to do should, I think, be relatively simple -- I just want to take a few separate pre-existing VOBs, smack 'em on a DVD, give them legible menus and chapters so they can be played separately and individually, and ideally add selectable (not hard-coded) subtitles. But it's not clear to me how the available free software for OS X can cooperate to make that possible. What's the simplest way to do what I have in mind?

Thanks in advance for your help, and sorry this is so long!

[terryj]

I hate to tell you this, but everything you described you wanted to do:
Combine .VOB assetts from multiple DVD sources, set Menu items
so that you can navigate correctly through the structure, and
put selectable SubTitle files per movie that can be enabled / dis-enabled,
I've done within 20 minutes using MpegStreamclip, Jubler, and DVD Studio Pro.
They are built to do just what you are trying to accomplish.

Freeware is nice, until you want the impossible.

[silverspell]

Well, I certainly do understand the value of retail software! I've worked as an audio engineer in a recording studio, and while I think highly of (for example) the Audacity project, I'd never dream of using it professionally. Similarly, I have access to a video studio with licensed copies of Final Cut Pro et al., so if I really wanted to bring out the heavy-hitters in lieu of freeware, it'd be possible (though I haven't a clue how to use FCP).

That being said, I was able to do the first two of those three things reasonably well (despite the menu limitations), and the third seems possible with ffmpegX, no? It's just putting all three things together that seems to be an issue. Honestly, I was surprised to get as far as I did!

Actually, this thread makes it sound as though if you're adept with the command line, it's indeed possible. Some of that goes over my head, but I'll try to make sense of it...

By the way, Miyu is working very nicely with the transcoded file, so that's a viable solution if all else fails.

[terryj]

Best of luck with it.
Let us know how your project ends up.

[Herve]

Actually, this thread makes it sound as though if you're adept with the command line, it's indeed possible.

right
for info, I use this command line to convert files (flv, mpeg, etc) to a Miyu compliant video file (but you need to install my soft, PS: no need to use it).
Open Terminal (/Applications/Utilities/Terminal)
copy and paste:

~/Library/Application\ Support/MovieConverter/ffmpeg -i (drag'n'drop your file from finder to the terminal window) ~/Desktop/File_for_Miyu.mov

the file will be on your desktop (Video file will be ugly, but you don't mind it's only a temporary file to work with. Advantages: this conversion is very fast and does not use a lot of disk space )

bye