free dvd authoring tool

[vhelp]

Hay liquid217,

Thanks for your updates (though I gotta get your lates 0.4.8 next)

But, I found out a problem I was suffering from, Aspect Ratios. Seems that
there might be a missing element in your GUI process maybe

In using other apps, (ie, my copy of MyDVD) it seems to display my 16:9
aspect ratio very close to what its suppose to (if I'm viewing them right)
.
.
Can you look into the code (please) to see if that is the reason whey my
16:9 seem to be coming out as 4:3 (or fullscreen) when you get'a chance ??

Really appreciate pal,
-vhelp

[disturbed1]

@ disturbed1
Ive tested on 2 playstation2 systems, and they've worked flawlessly. Are you using the iso that Mkisofs generates? if so, try burning just the vob/ifo/bup files by themselves (nero or something similar)

Thanks. Could just be my older version of PS2, as it does work on a version 7. Noticed an early post in this thread where someone else has the same problem with the output. I have managed to test on a total of 11 DVD players, all without problems.

I actually used Primo DVD to burn.

Hope you didn't think I was "blaming" your GUI. Stated that I used it, since it's pretty much fool proof.

One request though, can we have a change log? Or point me to where it is incase I missed it.

[liquid217]

@vhelp
Aspect ratios should be set by a flag that is in the mpeg2 stream. If you use an app called restream, you can check to see if that flag is set properly. Now it could be a situation where mplex or dvdauthor (the binarys) could be changing that. After authoring, review the log file to see if they are correctly detecting the aspect ratio. What 16:9 material ive used with dvdauthor seemed to work fine, but i didn't test it extensively.

@disturbed1
Great idea on the changelog! I will include that next time. (Although it won't be very long starting off because i haven't been keeping tabs on what ive been doing).

[vhelp]

@ liquid217 buddy,

@vhelp
Aspect ratios should be set by a flag that is in the mpeg2 stream. If you use an app called restream, you can check to see if that flag is set properly. Now it could be a situation where mplex or dvdauthor (the binarys) could be changing that. After authoring, review the log file to see if they are correctly detecting the aspect ratio. What 16:9 material ive used with dvdauthor seemed to work fine, but i didn't test it extensively.

Thanks for the restream tip. I'll give that app a go, and further, I'll do some
add'L testing w/ your GUI :P
.
.
I'll D/L restream now. I do hope that it allows me to change (if I need to)
the aspect ratio flag to what I want. If that works, and settles my issues w/
my prev AR problems, that will make me happy (for now)

Thanks,
-vhelp

[Abnormal]

Hi,

I have been trying out DVDAuthor and I seem to have a problem.
I am authoring a PAL 16:9 video with 3 audio streams.
The problem is that when I open the new VTS_01_0.IFO in IFOEdit i get this

VTS overview:

Menu attributes:
Video: MPEG-1 720x480 (NTSC) (NTSC 525/60) (4:3) (pan-scan & letterboxed)

Title Set (Movie) attributes:
Video: MPEG-2 720x576 (PAL) (PAL 625/50) (16:9) (pan-scan & letterboxed)
Audio 1: Not Specified (Dolby AC-3) 6ch 48Kbps DRC (ID: 0x80)
Audio 2: Not Specified (Dolby AC-3) 6ch 48Kbps DRC (ID: 0x81)
Audio 3: Not Specified (Dolby AC-3) 2ch 48Kbps DRC (ID: 0x82)

PGC_1 (program chain): [Title(TTN): 1] [01:37:26.00 / 30 fps] (Programs: 12) (Cells: 12) (uses VOB-IDs: 1)
[Ch 01] [Pg 01] [Cell 01] [V/C Id: 1/ 1] : time: 00:00:09.17 / 30 fps [Pos: 00:00:09.17] [Frames: 287] SP/ILVU/DISC/SA:[ no/ no/yes/ no]
[Ch 02] [Pg 02] [Cell 02] [V/C Id: 1/ 2] : time: 00:00:15.07 / 30 fps [Pos: 00:00:24.24] [Frames: 744] SP/ILVU/DISC/SA:[yes/ no/ no/ no]
[Ch 03] [Pg 03] [Cell 03] [V/C Id: 1/ 3] : time: 00:09:12.06 / 30 fps [Pos: 00:09:37.00] [Frames: 17310] SP/ILVU/DISC/SA:[yes/ no/ no/ no]
[Ch 04] [Pg 04] [Cell 04] [V/C Id: 1/ 4] : time: 00:08:56.10 / 30 fps [Pos: 00:18:33.10] [Frames: 33400] SP/ILVU/DISC/SA:[yes/ no/ no/ no]
[Ch 05] [Pg 05] [Cell 05] [V/C Id: 1/ 5] : time: 00:08:59.15 / 30 fps [Pos: 00:27:32.25] [Frames: 49585] SP/ILVU/DISC/SA:[yes/ no/ no/ no]
[Ch 06] [Pg 06] [Cell 06] [V/C Id: 1/ 6] : time: 00:09:16.15 / 30 fps [Pos: 00:36:49.10] [Frames: 66280] SP/ILVU/DISC/SA:[yes/ no/ no/ no]
[Ch 07] [Pg 07] [Cell 07] [V/C Id: 1/ 7] : time: 00:06:59.08 / 30 fps [Pos: 00:43:48.18] [Frames: 78858] SP/ILVU/DISC/SA:[yes/ no/ no/ no]
[Ch 08] [Pg 08] [Cell 08] [V/C Id: 1/ 8] : time: 00:08:21.23 / 30 fps [Pos: 00:52:10.11] [Frames: 93911] SP/ILVU/DISC/SA:[yes/ no/ no/ no]
[Ch 09] [Pg 09] [Cell 09] [V/C Id: 1/ 9] : time: 00:12:34.20 / 30 fps [Pos: 01:04:45.01] [Frames: 116551] SP/ILVU/DISC/SA:[yes/ no/ no/ no]
[Ch 10] [Pg 10] [Cell 10] [V/C Id: 1/10] : time: 00:09:31.22 / 30 fps [Pos: 01:14:16.23] [Frames: 133703] SP/ILVU/DISC/SA:[yes/ no/ no/ no]
[Ch 11] [Pg 11] [Cell 11] [V/C Id: 1/11] : time: 00:15:36.15 / 30 fps [Pos: 01:29:53.08] [Frames: 161798] SP/ILVU/DISC/SA:[yes/ no/ no/ no]
[Ch 12] [Pg 12] [Cell 12] [V/C Id: 1/12] : time: 00:07:31.17 / 30 fps [Pos: 01:37:24.25] [Frames: 175345] SP/ILVU/DISC/SA:[yes/ no/ no/ no]

As you can see DVDAuthor is setting PGC1 as 30fps when it should be 25fps. I dont know why this happens so wondered if someone could help.

Also i do get quite a few "WARN: audio sector out of range: -865781 (vobu #11470, pts 525894112)" errors at the end. I dont know if this is related or not.

Thanks
Abnormal

[Baldrick]

Abnormal: Are you using liquids dvdauthorgui?

[Compugup]

Abnormal,

A bigger chance of getting a reply to such a question you will have at the DVDA user forum which you can find here: http://sourceforge.net/mail/?group_id=59028

Compugup.

[liquid217]

I noticed that you used a 720x480 mpeg1 stream for the menu. If this is correct, that would be invalid for a dvd, let alone the PAL system. Im guessing since you are from england, that you really meant to use 720x576 mpeg2 (a valid dvd resolution/format for PAL).

[KYUSS]

any ideas on my log m8?

[Abnormal]

Hi,

Sorry for the delay, Been working .

I did not use any GUI and my XML was this, but with more chapters.

<dvdauthor dest="F:\Temp\VIDEO_TS\">
<vmgm> </vmgm>
<titleset>
<titles>
<pgc>
<vob file="vts01.mpg" chapters="00:00:00.00,00:00:09.17,00:00:25.05,00:0 9:37.05,00:18:31.05" />
</pgc>
</titles>
</titleset>
</dvdauthor>

As for the menu, i did not create one. Dont know why it set the menu to NTSC perhaps that is the problem. When I get home i will try setting the Menu parameters. I will also have a look at the DVDA user forum.

Thanks
Abnormal

[liquid217]

@KYUSS
Sorry for the delay. Honestly, i have no idea. The log just dies obnormally for no apparent reason. I looks like it dies when authoring title2, (at around 974 Meg into it). Usually, dvdauthor will throw an error message if there was something wrong, so im kinda puzzled. I do know though, that you should use the latest version of the gui. The previous versions (0.4.7) didn't handle PAL very well. I corrected that in 0.4.8. If it still flops, try running the "script.bat" that is created in the application's directory. This is essentually what the gui uses to run the authoring process. Other than that, i don't know. It sounds like there could be something wrong with title2.

[KYUSS]

ok m8
thanks for your help..........i will try with 2 different titles

cheers
KYUSS

[Abnormal]

@Compugup
Thanks for the sugestion of contacting DVDA user forum as I got a response that this has been fixed in 0.6.9.

So just got to wait for 0.6.9 to be compiled for win32.

Thanks
Abnormal

[Compugup]

Point taken Abnormal .

I'm working on the win32 compilation.

Compugup.

[Buckwheat469]

Have you tried making a PHP or ASP webpage that accesses the command line? basically have someone upload the file to a server and run the commands with whatever settings from the server. Then when the server has completed the process it sends the user to a download location.

This would only work with relatively small files, not like a whole DVD but then a user doesn't need a hugely powerful system to run the conversion.

Also if you did it right you could market it and have the ability to convert any file to any file type, add text, flashy stuff like that.

[trossin]

I think I found the place in the source code where to fix the bug that I'm running into in dvdauthor.

https://www.videohelp.com/forum/viewtopic.php?t=207068

I downloaded the dvdauthor0.6.8 source and took a look for the offending code and think that I have found it.

In the file dvdcompile.c in the function compilecs under the case VM_CALL subcase for VMGM (ines 646 and 648) should have the 5th byte changed from 0x00 to 0x01.

I have Visual C++ 6.0 but I don't have all the gnu stuff so I'm not able to try the fix. Does anyone that is able to build dvdauthor for win32 feel like giving it a try?

[liquid217]

http://users.adelphia.net/~liquid64/dvdauthor0.6.9-win32test.rar

As noted in the filename, i used 0.6.9, and modified the 2 lines you referred to in the post. I have not tested these binaries, so let me know if this takes care of the problem you referred to.

[trossin]

Thanks liquid217. The change did the trick.

I would like to learn how to build these tools one day. Is there a guide or instructions on how to setup all the tools to be able to build sourceforge projects under win32? I used to be a Unix/Xwindows junky and switched to PCs about 10 years ago. At work I still use HP-UX on an HP Unix machine. I tried to compile dvdauthor under HP-UX but it was missing some libraries.

I did some experiments with my DVD players last night and found that the Apex machine can play any piece of junk I throw at it. The Panasonic RV-31 machine is much more picky. The XML file that I used is included below.

Even with the ifoedit hack, the RV-31 would instantly go to a STOP state when I selected a movie to play. I found that if I removed the titleset menus command, the RV-31 would play the disk fine. The interesting thing is that it does not care if I hack the post commands with ifoedit or not. It works either way as long as I remove the titleset menu post command.

By the way, I got this XML file from an example in the docs for dvdstyler.

<dvdauthor dest="Out">
  <vmgm> 
    <menus> 
      <pgc> 
	<button> jump title 1; </button> 
	<button> jump title 2; </button>
	<button> jump title 2; </button>
        <vob file="menu.mpg" pause="inf"/> 
      </pgc>
    </menus> 
  </vmgm>
  <titleset>
    <menus><pgc><post> jump vmgm menu 1; </post></pgc></menus> 
    <titles> 
      <pgc> 
        <post> call vmgm menu 1; </post> 
	<vob file="movie1.mpg" chapters="0,00:32,01:00"/> 
      </pgc> 
      <pgc> 
        <post> call vmgm menu 1; </post> 
	<vob file="movie1.mpg" chapters="0,00:32,01:00"/> 
      </pgc> 
    </titles> 
  </titleset> 
</dvdauthor>

[liquid217]

its actually quite easy to compile under win32. Most of the tools have been compiled under cygwin (www.cygwin.com). Cygwin is a posix like environment which also doubles as an emulation layer. I would recommend that if you use cygwin, to install everything, except for X. Compiling the tools is just the standard ./configure ; make.
Dvdauthor also requires the libdvdread libraries (to create the dvdunmux and spuunmux).

On a different note, dvdauthorgui uses titleset menus, would you happen to know what needs to be changed for a titleset menu to be called from a title? If i have some time this weekend, more than likely, ill start investigating with ifoedit

[trossin]

I'm not sure how to deal with the titleset menus that dvdauthorgui uses. I noticed that dvdauthrogui uses them as well but only played with it to see if there was a trick to work around the problem that I was having. As ifoedit complained about that code, I never tried it on my DVD player.

I will try some experiments tonight to see what it takes to make my player happy with titleset menus. Maybe it will just work and the deal is that the player can not handle a titleset menu with just a post command in it.

[The Mask]

Hi there,

I have changed from IfoEdit to DvdAuthor because it is a console application that is easy to control from my program.

Everything is working fine only I have 1 question:

In the xml file for DvdAuthor I want to implement the languages of the audio and subtitle, but I can't get it to work.

If I play the result in IfoEdit or PowerDVD it only shows audio1 and subtitle1 and not English and Dutch. When I open the IFO files in IfoEdit there are also no language names.

This is the xml file I used:

<dvdauthor dest="C:\The FilmMachine\DVD">
  <vmgm>
    <menus lang="en">
      <audio lang="en"/>
      <subpicture lang="nl"/>
    </menus>
  </vmgm>
  <titleset>
    <menus>
      <pgc>
        <button> jump title 1 chapter 1; </button>
       <vob file="C:\The FilmMachine\TFM_DVD_Menu.mpg" pause="5"/>
      </pgc>
    </menus>
      <titles>
        <pgc>
          <vob file="C:\The FilmMachine\TFM_Subbed_Video.mpg" chapters="00:00:00.0"/>
          <post>exit;</post>
        </pgc>
      </titles>
  </titleset>
</dvdauthor>

Can anyone help me with this problem?

[Abnormal]

Hi,
For the audio, i think you should have a "<audio lang="en"/>" for each audio channel after all <menu> lines. But for subtitles i dont know as looking at Help at http://dvdauthor.sourceforge.net/doc/dvdauthor.html your XML looks correct.
Anyway hope this helps

Abnormal

[Abnormal]

Hi,
Has anyone had problems running SPUMux (which comes with DVDAuthor) from Visual basic since if i shell this command i get a "Only one argument expected" error but if I paste this into a Command Prompt it works perfectly.

C:\dvd\dvdauthor\spumux.exe -s0 F:\TestDVD\VTS01\Sub1.xml < F:\TestDVD\VTS01\VTS__01_P01.mpg > F:\TestDVD\VTS01\VTS__01_P01_Sub.mpg

Im sure it is something simple but i can not see it.

Thanks
Abnormal

[Abnormal]

Hi,
Ignore my previous post as i have sorted my problem with SPUMux.
For some reason i have to run it from a batch file to get it to work.

Thanks
Abnormal

[liquid217]

the only problem I can see is that spumux needs the input mpeg file piped into the STDIN and the STDOUT needs piped to the output file ( Thats the reason for the < and > ). I don't use the "shell" command much in vb6, but i would have thought it would accept it. I see though, you are using the same make-shift solution that i came up with (using a bat file, and then call the process).

[mats.hogberg]

You can redirect stdin & stdout in VB (for example to catch text output to stdout from a comman line tool to show it in a text box in a GUI) but it's somewhat hard to do, and not worth the trouble if a bat file works...

/Mats

[Abnormal]

Hi,
Thanks for replying.
I assumed it would be something with SPUMux since DVDAuthor works fine.
I found out about the stdin & stdout yesterday when I needed to capture the output of SPUMux to find out what was wrong. It was how i found out it was a "Only one argument expected" error. Anyway decided it was to complicated so have stuck with Batch file.

@Compugup
Would it possible for you to change SPUMux and Mplex so that it did not close the command window if there is an error.

p.s Does anyone else find SPUMux way to slow. It is starting to put me off DVDAuthor. It has taken about 2 1/2 hours to Mux 17 subtitles. It would be so much quicker if it would Mux all subs at the same time.


Thanks
Abnormal

[liquid217]

if you are using a batch file now, just include a "pause" function as the last line in the batch file.
When executed, it will ask for you to press any key to continue...

[Abnormal]

Hi,
The thing is that i only want it to pause when there is an error. I assume since linux is command line based it is not a problem but with windows it would be usefull as otherwise there is no way of seeing what the error is if it occurs two soon.

In fact thinking back to my good old DOS days I remember the DOS Error Codes. I wonder whether SPUMux and Mplex can return these.

Thanks
Abnormal

Edit: Forget the DOS Error Codes. I just checked and it does not Return them.

[louv68]

Is this a Linux or Windows program?