IFO edit on a Mac, proof of concept

[dnix71]

Trai Forresters TFDVDEDIT ($700) is the only native Mac app that will make ifo's from vob's, but if you have Virtual PC and some patience, it is possible to run ifoedit 0.96 in virtual Win98 to do the same for free.
I finally backed up the main feature of Shrek 2 tonight, using MTR and ifoedit. It took 3 1/2 hours to process 4.1GB of vob's across a firewire share drive, but the disc(burned dvd udf mode in Toast 6 Ti) played.
A real pc running ifoedit is an order of magnitude faster, all other things being equal.
Virtual PC crashed several times trying this earlier, and I realized it was necessary to alter the energy saver options on the Mac to never shut down either the internal or external hard drive. I disabled ACPM on the virtual 98, too, just to be safe.
Before this I would rip vob's on the Mac and switch the firewire hd back and forth between the Mac and pc to complete the process, so it wouldn't be necessary to burn a dvd of the vob's to edit on the pc.
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I confirmed tonight that the real holdup in processing vob's virtually is the firewire share drive. I installed Diskeeper on the virtual 98 to try to defrag the vob folder, because the processing starts out fast and then slows way down, but it couldn't see anything but the C: drive. When I attempted to copy 4.1GB of vob's to the virtual desktop, I quit very quickly after the file copy window told me it would take about 15 years to finish. Reading from the dvd/cd combo drive is almost as fast as the real thing, but that would mean burning a dvd of the vob's first.

[pants]

http://www.macetvideo.com/mydvdedit/mydvdedit.html

hopefully when the edit function comes to this ap, we'll have some thing like ifo edit on the mac, besides, tfdvdedit.

[dnix71]

bump.
I began to think outside the box. While surfing for a Linux ifo editor that I could run in X11, I came across a post for speeding up ifo edit. I wish I had the source code for it, because it has a major flaw. If you drag the progress window offscreen so that only the top bar shows, it runs like a bat out of hell.
It only took FIVE MINUTES instead of 3 1/2 hours, to process the same 4.1 GB vob's in Virtual 98 that way!
The red (read) light on the firewire drive went on and stayed on the whole time. If I can find an ifo editor that runs terminal or X11, I'll post back.

[Falcon500]

bump.
If you drag the progress window offscreen so that only the top bar shows, it runs like a bat out of hell.
It only took FIVE MINUTES instead of 3 1/2 hours, to process the same 4.1 GB vob's in Virtual 98 that way!
The red (read) light on the firewire drive went on and stayed on the whole time. If I can find an ifo editor that runs terminal or X11, I'll post back.

Out of interest have you tried this method to speed it up on Virtual PC and also what version of IFOedit was it with?

[dnix71]

ifoedit 0.96. I opened the program in hexedit. Near the bottom is code for calculating and refreshing the progress bar. The 5 minute - 3 1/2 hour comparison WAS in virtual Win98.

On a real pc(PIII, 1.1Ghz coppermine celeron with 512mb ram) it takes 20-30 minutes to process a movies worth of vob's with the progress window up front. I haven't tried it the other way on the pc yet.

I checked processor usage on the Mac while running virtual pc and ifo edit. 85% of my mac's cpu cycles were being used to run the virtual 98, so upping the 'nice' wouldn't help.

Ram Booster in virtual 98 reported 100% cpu use all the time even at idle(explorer and systray), and only about 64 mb of ram in use out of 256 available, so I can't get any increase there by killing a process or upping ram.

ifo's homepage seems not to have updated in 2+ years. The author must have moved onto other things. The pc I have does not have Internet Explorer anymore, I recently used IEradicate to remove it and also break the desktop web shell integration.

ifoedit 0.96 works fine with or without IE, so maybe if the author of ifoedit would share his VB6 code with the rest of us, someone could rewrite it in C, so it could be compiled for Linux/Mac.

[Falcon500]

Try emailing him at this address and see what he says? I have emailed him before about a mac version and he said he was in contact with someone who was interested in porting his version over to the mac. Obviously nothing has come of it as we would have heard something by now.....

derrow@yahoo.com