Thank you so much, Universal!

[Instant Martian]

Hi there,
I'm not sure if this is the right section to post.
After a long wait Universal has just released here in Italy the 8th and final season of one of my all time favourite
tv-series: Magnum P.I..
Having bought the first two seasons years ago I decided to complete the collection with the remaining six seasons.
I have just received the package with the dvd "boxes" and, for my extreme displeasure, Universal has screwed everithing up.
The packages of the first two seasons were nice digipacks with single tray for each dvd. This new seasons are in ugly/twisted black multi-amarays with the discs coupled, one disc layered over the other and locked in a way that you have to risk a break if you want to remove them.
But the worst thing is Universal has changed (for the bad) everything: covers layout, disc labels, even authoring and menus.
With old discs, when I select an episode to play it starts immediately, with the new discs if I select an episode I go to a
chapter selection menu and I have to play the episode from this menu.
Now here comes the question:
since I'm going to make a copy of all the discs on DVD-Rs, is there an (easy) way to set things so that each episode plays when I select it in the main menu? And if so will I still be able to access to the episode chapter menu in some way (e.g. pressing the menu button on the remote during playback)?
Thanks.

[jman98]

For several years now, Universal has made "interesting" (in a bad way) packaging decisions. They also use dual sided DVDs sometimes to reduce the number of discs they ship and some people hate that.

I know that you can make the change you want by using IFOEdit or PGCEdit, but I don't know how to make this specific change. I know how to change it so that a menu comes up immediately on playback instead of anti-copying stuff. The mechanism is surely similar, but the action of going from an episode selection to a chapter is something I have never seen before and don't know how to fix. Hopefully others will know or at least if nothing else my post told you what tools can do this.

[Instant Martian]

Thanks jman98.
I'm one of those who hate DL DVDs, but this is not the case (only there is no consistency in the covers or disc labels between the several season sets, I could have done better myself). As a result, there are at least other three tv-series that I wolud like to buy but they are all from Universal and I think I will never give my money to them again.
As for the tools to be used, I knew that PGCEdit was probably involved but I wait for some that knows exactly what to do.
Thanks anyway.

[usually_quiet]

I have used PgcEdit to reprogram my self-authrored DVD's when I couldn't figure out any way to get them to do what I want using the authoring programs I have.

Eliminating the detour to the chapter menus could be relatively straightforward and easy, or messy and difficult, depending on how the DVD was programmed to work. You might only need to change the episode selection button to jump to a title instead of a menu, however the jump to the menu might be somewhere else instead.

The first step is to figure out how the DVD works now. PgcEdit's trace function and various features from the "Info" menu would be useful for that, as well as for debugging your changes. Once you locate the command and change it, you may also find other changes are needed for the DVD to function as you wish. ...and there's another decision for you to make as well. Do you want a way to access the chapter menus, or do you want to get rid of them entirely?

If this doesn't sound like fun to you, my advice is to leave the DVDs as they are.

[manono]

If this doesn't sound like fun to you, my advice is to leave the DVDs as they are.

I agree. For anyone with any experience with PGCEdit, doing this sort of thing would be reasonably straight forward. But if you've no experience with the program, fixing something like this isn't the place to start. Walk before you run, so to speak.

In any event, usually_quiet's advice about learning how the Trace function works is good advice. If it's an easy fix (make it jump to a title rather than to a menu), by fooling around with the Trace to see what the commands do, you may stumble across the fix.

Besides, even if you knew how to correct it, you'd still have to decrypt it to the hard drive, fix the problem, and then burn it back to a dual layer DVD. Either that or shrink it to fit on a DVD5. Not worth the time, effort, and expense, I'd say, especially for many (?) DVDs in several box sets, and especially just to save a few button pushes on the remote control.

[Instant Martian]

Uhm, I see.
I will see if I can figure the PGCEdit stuff out.
Thanks anyway guys.