Extended Edition discs

General questions or discussion about HandBrake, Video and/or audio transcoding, trends etc.
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kevinbal
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Joined: Fri Feb 23, 2007 4:20 am

Extended Edition discs

Post by kevinbal »

I've recently begun the long and painstaking process of encoding my dvd library into h.264 as prep for the apple tv. If everything works the way it seems like, the idea of having all my movies to just scroll through sounds too good to pass up.

Anyways, mediahandforkbrake works wonders for this.... except in the case of 2 discs movies, like the Lord of the Rings for example.....

I was wondering if anyone has a good suggestion to combine the 2 discs into just 1 file that has the entire movie?

I'm pretty sure iMovie could do that... but the time to import and then export is very long. Any ideas?
baggss
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Post by baggss »

If you have Quicktime Pro you can copy and paste the disc 2 file onto the end of the disc 1 file and save it for iPod. It will take forever, but you'll get what you want.

Another option is to use the "Stitch Movies Together" feature in Visual Hub, but I've never done it so I don't know how well it works.
Nonsanity
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Post by Nonsanity »

I haven't used it much, but QTCoffee might just do the joining faster than a recompress would.

http://www.3am.pair.com/QTCoffee.html

I'd love to hear how well it works. I'll try and give it a test run myself soon.
homermaster
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Post by homermaster »

You will most likely find problems with doing this. The end of the first disk (or the beginning of the second disk, I can't remember which) has some video frames that have no audio attached. This has produced an audio skew in the part of the movie from the second disk as other encoding programs I have used simply attach the audio and video portions together. This has happened on some Disney movies that have the same video frames with no audio at the beginning of the movie so the audio starts before it should in the encode.

I have numerous ways to fix these problems but the easiest solution would be to concatenate the vobs and (hopefully) MediaFork is smart enough to see the frames with no audio and compensate. I will do a little testing and see if this is the case. If not I will offer another way to accomplish it.
kevinbal
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Post by kevinbal »

Well, I joined the movies right in Quicktime Pro by the cut and paste method.... the audio seemed to sync up just fine... there's a little stutter in the transition (I'm pretty sure that can't be avoided since the disc itself transitions from one title to the other to indicate the time for the disc change).

Here's what I don't understand though. The export option on Quicktime lists iPod and you can't edit any kind of settings - Apple's website says it exports at 320x240 but talks about it on a 640x480 ipod.

What is the exact resolution that QT Pro exports at? And will it export at the same bitrate as the movies were encoded in?
rhester
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Post by rhester »

kevinbal wrote:What is the exact resolution that QT Pro exports at? And will it export at the same bitrate as the movies were encoded in?
Later releases of QuickTime (fall 2006 onward) consider the iPod export to mean 640x480x1500kbps single-pass H.264. These settings cannot be adjusted.

Rodney
kevinbal
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Post by kevinbal »

Alright, we'll see how this QT export from a .mov of the combined 2 .m4v files goes ;)

Luckily there aren't too many movies that fall into this category.
homermaster
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Post by homermaster »

Interesting, handbrake requires the information files (.ifo's) and can't directly read the video object files (.vob's) that the video, audio, and subtitle tracks are stored in. This isn't a problem in itself as IFOEdit can be used to create the ifo's from a vob file.


Here is what I did:
1. Ripped the last minute of the first disk and the first minute of the second disk
2. Followed the instructions on http://members.dodo.net.au/~jimmalenko/test.htm to join the vob files and create the ifo's
3. Ran MediaforkCLI (Windows) with the switches: -i c:\movie -o c:\movie.mp4 -e x264b30 -b 1450 -E faac -B 160 -2 -w 640

and I got:
MediaFork 0.8.0b1
2 CPUs detected
Opening c:\movie...

*** libdvdread: CHECK_VALUE failed in ifo_read.c:543 ***
*** for vtsi_mat->vtsi_last_sector*2 <= vtsi_mat->vts_last_sector ***

(above two lines repeated)

Scanning title 1 ...
No title found.
MediaFork has exited.


I took small segments of each disk to keep encoding time to a minimum but it looks like I may have taken too little as the second line starting with *** looks to be some logical test that my clip failed.

If someone can shed some light on this it would be great. I'll keep doing some testing and report back. I am also keeping it as a goal to keep solutions to problems to freeware, not just because it's free but to support the developers of freeware.
Last edited by homermaster on Fri Feb 23, 2007 11:38 pm, edited 1 time in total.
homermaster
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Post by homermaster »

I don't have a Mac and am not sure what tools are out there with regards to "cleaning" or changing things with a DVD. I did find myDVDEdit http://www.mydvdedit.com/ which seems to be a fairly comprehensive tool, and there is some explanation from the author on how to combine vobs using the program here

http://www.mydvdedit.com/viewtopic.php? ... ix&pg=main

I am on Windows and the tools I used were VobEdit and IfoEdit to concatenate the vobs and create new ifos as described in the previous link. There was still something wrong with the ifos (vtsi_mat, vtsi_last_sector are part of an ifo) and when libdvdread tried to understand the DVD structure, it ran into a problem. This problem, along with the video frames without audio, were fixed by another program called VobBlanker. After that MediaFork was able to read the combined disks and successfully encode everything into one file.

So this is a fix for anyone that at least has access to a Windows computer. As for those with Mac access only the vobs can be joined by myDVDEdit but it is possible that the video frames without audio would remain. However, it seems that libdvdread might be smart enough to see the offset and compensate in the final encode so there is no audio skew from the video on the second disk. If someone would like to try this scenario I would be more than happy to help.
kevinbal
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Joined: Fri Feb 23, 2007 4:20 am

Post by kevinbal »

Alright, so the quicktime export to ipod worked like a charm.... its not perfect
at the transition, if I really wanted I could have gone into iMovie and edited in a fade....

But other than that, the simple cut and paste into quicktime worked well enough for me....it just took a long long time.

Given that I'm only going to do this for 3 movies right now, its not too bad... maybe if another solution comes at some point down the road, I'll redo them, but I'm perfectly happy with the outcome for what it is.

I don't have any issues with my audio, so I'm not sure what this discussion is all about.... it syncs up fine in both halves.
JoeBob
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Easy Peasy

Post by JoeBob »

Do like the Copy and Paste method, only don't export for iPod. Export for h.264 or MPEG4. Then, under the video settings, where you select the codec, select Pass Through. The Audio will need to be re-encoded, but it will come out perfectly. Click OK and save. It'll take far less time than the iPod option and it won't re-encode the video! Viola!
homermaster
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Post by homermaster »

I guess I have to explain a little bit. I am a quality freak and don't want a patch of two previous encodes. I was looking for a way to get the two disks combined into one and have MediaFork be able to read, understand, and encode from the concatenated vobs and reauthored ifos. The problems I had in previous posts in this thread is a credit to how rigorous Mediafork is in reading the ifos.

The audio sync problems are from prevoius encoding programs that I have used were not as rigorous at reading the ifos and would not recognize that there were some video frames without audio. They would do separate audio and video encodes and then simply mux them together without regard as to where the audio started in relation to the video (information that is in the ifo). I apologize for the fact that I thought that MediaFork would do the same. It does not.

As an example of how smart MediaFork is, there is someone who has this problem of video frames with no audio numerous times throughout a video title set. MediaFork recognizes this as a PTS discontinuity and will INSERT audio where it is needed to make sure that everything stays in sync. You can see that discussion here
http://handbrake.m0k.org/forum/viewtopic.php?t=264

I have been a member here for two days and have learned a lot in those two days. The more I learn the more impressed I am with the program, and I am just using the CLI for Windows. It truly is a marvel and I hope that all of you that use the program recognize that fact.
dynaflash
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Post by dynaflash »

glad you like the program.
One obvious note on joining a two disc movie. If you have dtox. Join it with dtox and output it to a file set. Then run the file set through HB/MF.

In my experience DTOX seems to do a nice job joining two disc movies.
Eileron
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Joined: Sat Feb 24, 2007 9:22 pm

Post by Eileron »

Here's the way I rip things, just to throw it out there.

Necessary Programs:
Rip4Me (Windows, Free) - Recommended
MacTheRipper - used when Rip4Me fails
DVD2oneX - Used to Merge and fix things.
Handbrake - Used to Rip

Alright. I have a macbook and an old Windows PC I use for rippings. To rip a 2 disc edition like you're talking about, here's what I do:

1) Rip the two discs with Rip4Me - Rip4Me goes through the disc and eliminates mastering errors, blank cells, bad VOBs, all that stuff, leaving a typically completely clean file set for reencoding.

1 alternate) Rip with MacTheRipper. The current non 3.0 version will rip everything, including bad sectors and bad cells - you can then open it up in DVD2oneX and have it reencode the file set, manually unsetting all the blank cells. I used to do this until I ran across a DVD that had a few hundred cells, more than half of which were 0 cells - Rip4Me got rid of all those automagically.

2) Take your first disc folder, and open it with DVD2oneX. Use the "Movie-only" copy, then click the "seamless title add" and open your second disc. Now make sure the audio and subtitle tracks you may want to rip are there, make sure it isn't compressing your file (I typically set the custom output-max size to 10,000 mb, so it doesn't compress) and then tell it to go. It typically takes about 5 to 10 minutes to patch the two together.

3) Use Handbrake to rip your newly combined title. I use 1500 kbps h.264 with 48khz and 192 audio, 2-pass, and it seems to rip just about perfectly.

My only issues now are space (which is why I use 1500kbps) and whether a great deal of quality is lost when I have to deinterlace some videos - I'd be curious to see if there's a way to combine deinterlaced video somehow instead of removing it. Or something. But I'm not a programmer :P...

Hope this helps. And yeah, DVD2oneX costs some money, but it's worth it for the speed gains...and when your ripping programs fail, it can typically process things to make a useable folder anyway.
kevinbal
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Joined: Fri Feb 23, 2007 4:20 am

Re: Easy Peasy

Post by kevinbal »

JoeBob wrote:Do like the Copy and Paste method, only don't export for iPod. Export for h.264 or MPEG4. Then, under the video settings, where you select the codec, select Pass Through. The Audio will need to be re-encoded, but it will come out perfectly. Click OK and save. It'll take far less time than the iPod option and it won't re-encode the video! Viola!
Thanks for the pass through tip, JoeBob! That shaved literally hours off of the time to finish up the LotR series. Cheers!
dog99
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Post by dog99 »

Alright, we'll see how this QT export from a .mov of the combined 2 .m4v files goes. :oops: :cry: :wink:
JoeBob
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Joined: Sat Feb 24, 2007 8:44 am

Post by JoeBob »

I'm glad I can help It's the technique I've been using...but I can't lay full claim to it. I got the idea from an article on Macworld for making films "network ready" Whereby you passthrough the audio and video and setup the streaming prefs so that Front Row will stream the movies properly. But, it works on this occasion as well!
FaiT
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Joined: Wed Mar 23, 2011 9:54 pm

Re: Extended Edition discs

Post by FaiT »

Are there any other programs that fix errors like that? It sounds advantageous to fix vob errors before encoding. Anyone have any Ideas?
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