Hello,

Apologies if this isn't the right forum for this, I couldn't find a generic (S)VCD forum.

As you may well be aware, there is a well established system for generating a unique 64bit ID for any given DVD. On Windows, it's provided by the API, and I have released code for generating such IDs on other platforms.

Having recently acquired a VCD, and wanting to use the same method for managing metadata for (S)VCDs as for my DVD collection, I decided to adapt the dvdid system to work on (S)VCDs. Unfortunately, because of the way that (S)VCDs are structured, and the way that OSes presents them, making this work consistently across platforms has proven difficult.

I've come up with a proposed system, and encorporated it into the latest alpha version of the dvdid software. I'd be very grateful if anyone with (S)VCDs could give it a try, firstly, to make sure it successfully returns an id (there a fair bit of sanity checking included in the code to check my assumptions about supported platforms, and if they're violated it'll return an error), and secondly, to check that the same id is returned between different platforms.

The latest alpha version is 0.2.0a, and can be downloaded from http://www.srcf.ucam.org/~cjk32/dvdid. There's a Win32 binary, and source code which should compile on any Unix-like platform. IDs will be returned for DVDs on any platform, but (S)VCDs will only work on Windows, Linux, FreeBSD and Mac OS, due to the need to know about the platform's behaviour. If you can provide information about / test on other platforms, I'd be very interested to hear from you.

Any feedback is much appreciated, especially reports of errors / inconsistencies, but just reports of successful generation of IDs would be very welcome. Also, should you happen to have any out-of-spec or otherwise technically interesting DVDs with which to test the DVD code, I'd be grateful for any reports.



Thanks in advance,

Christopher Key



P.S.

As noted on the site, this is currently alpha quality code. Whilst it's been tested, there may be bugs, so please don't rely too much on the IDs it generates. Also, whilst I'm reasonably happy that the method used for generaing IDs for (S)VCDs can be made to work reliably and consistently across platforms, testing may indicate some problems that necessitate a change, so again, please don't rely on such IDs not to change yet. Once I've had some reports back, the spec can be finalised.