megui - using it's avscutter while keeping original audio

[pooksahib]

Hi. I'm sure I've done this is the past but I seem to have forgotten how. I want to make a vid comprising specific songs from a music DVD but retaining the original audio. So far, I've indexed the VOB using megui. Then I opened the script using megui's avscutter, added the start/end of two songs, added those cuts to the script, saved a 'cuts' file and then closed avscutter.

I now have, in addition to the original VOB, an ac3 file, a d2v file, an avs file and a clt file (the 'cuts' file.) Next step is to open the avs file with megui's avscutter and it's here that I'm stuck – please see the attachment. If anyone can point me in the right direction, I'd be grateful. Thank you.

[hello_hello]

Normally any extracted audio is automatically loaded into the audio section after indexing. I'm not sure why that didn't happen, but you can easily add the extracted AC3 yourself.

If you added the cuts to the script using the AVS cutter and saved a cuts file, adding the cuts file to the audio section will ensure the audio is encoded to match. I don't know why it's not working, or why you mentioned opening the script with the AVS cutter a second time. You only need to use it to add the cuts once. There's also an Audio Cutter under the Tools menu that'll use the cuts file to cut it losslessly if you don't want to re-encode. You'll then have to use AutoEncode to give you a completed file (adding the extracted/split audio) or mux the audio with the video yourself.

It definitely should work, but this is one occasion I'd use an alternative method myself.

Open the DVD/ripped files with DVD Shrink. Select Re-Author mode from the top menu. You'll see a bunch of titles on the right. Each title may be a single song or a bunch of songs etc, it depends on the DVD. Preview the titles and pick one to drag to the left pane. If it contains multiple songs, drag it across to the left pane multiple times. Repeat for additional titles. From there, you can use the edit button above the left pane to edit the title down to a single song if you want to. If a title contains more than one song, chances are pretty good they'll be split by chapter and the editor makes it easy to edit a title down to a single chapter. It'll look something like this (thumbnails):





When you're done, switch to the compression tab, highlight the DVD line at the top of the left pane (not a single title) and disable compression on the right. You can select and deselect the audio and subtitle streams to keep too. Use the backup function to save the re-authored version to your hard drive.

The reason for all that, is once it's done, the backup version will contain a single ifo and vob file set for each song, or however you edited the titles with DVD Shrink, so you can simply open each vob and encode it without MeGUI needing to do any cutting. Nothing again MeGUI's AVS cutter. I use it a lot, but if you're cutting a whole DVD down to many individual songs, doing it before encoding is probably easier. I always use the same method for dividing DVD vobs into individual episodes, or to extract just the movie title etc, ready for encoding.

[pooksahib]

Hello hello_hello and (not for the first time) many thanks for going to all that trouble. I'm sorry to say, I've probably wasted your time. By chance, I noticed that the VOB is timed at 2h35m (by PotPlayer) whereas the corresponding ac3 plays for 3h05m. Clearly something wrong so I opened PGCDemux and the chapters etc are all to hell. Truth be told, it's a cheapo DVD. I'm not going to spend any more time on it but I'll keep your post handy for the next time I need it. Thanks again.

[hello_hello]

Don't take any player's word for it regarding the length of vob files if you open them directly though. They're not really designed to be opened that way. If there's a corresponding IFO file, open it instead, or check the duration in MeGUI's preview after indexing with DGIndex. That should be accurate.