DVD burning mod (7/14/06 - v1.4.2)

[evilpenguin]

This Plug-in is dead. I recommend using VideoRedo for all your DVD creation and burning needs.

What works:

• Schedule DVD creation using Default STV or SageMC
• Create DVD's playable on a standalone DVD player with your remote control
• Automatic HDTV/SDTV/xvid -> Burnable DVD image
• SDTV shows can be recorded in any recording profile
• Can have up to 7 shows or ~2.5 hours per DVD
• HDTV shows retain their original AC3 sound
• Burn DVD's from the "Other Programs" Menu
• Chapters are created from comskip files
• If no comskip file exists chapters will be automatically generated
• Dynamically generated Media Portal themed menus
• SDTV->DVD w/o transcoding provided there is enough space
• You don't need to install PERL to run it!

Credit where credit is due:
* Special thanks to mlbdude for his fantastic STV, without which I never would have bothered with any of this.
* Kjake wrote some absolutely killer dynamic menu generation code that I modeled my menus after.
* All of the images used in for menus are from the Media Portal project. They are already included in the SageMC 16x9 download.
* I hacked together some full STV's and Flachbar was awesome enough to turn them into nice, clean, imports

Download and install instructions




Change log:

8/14/06 – v1.4.2
* Added advanced preference item to force the script to allow you to use the C: for your work folder.

7/31/06 – v1.4.1
* Fixed bug with video preprocessing where I was checking a non-existent variable to see if it was null (it was)
* Dirmonless operation is now (finally) disabled by default
* Added advanced.pref item to strip problem characters out of show information before they cause problems. Now if new characters arise you can just add them to list in your advanced.pref file instead of me having to crank out a new build
* Added an option to completely disable using episode information in file names. This is a very poor work around for people whose EPG data contains non-English characters and I’m sorry I couldn’t come up with something better

Also, in case you missed it, I uploaded a few extra DVD menus to the Downloads page. So if you're tired of BlueTwo you can try those out

[foolio]

Does this transcode all your SD MPEG2 files ? Can I somehow just have it burn the MPEG2 as is without wasting cpu cycles transcoding?

great work

[evilpenguin]

Yeah, right now i'm transcoding everything just because my main focus has been HDTV and .avi's, which is what I burn 99% of the time.

The problem is that even if the SDTV mpegs are recorded with a DVD profile, DVDauthorGUI complains that the "mpegs don't contain nav packets" and won't touch 'em, so I assume dvdauthor won't either. I personally have no idea what that means, but I know there has to be an easier way to fix it than just transcoding the whole darn thing. So, it's on my todo list, but after I get this multi-video DVD thing working.

[BBCritical]

This feature will cause me to use SageMCE so bravo on your efforts...

BTW. This may be jumping the gun a little but do yoiu plan on adding a way to burn cds from music files... I would think that it would be simpler and along the same lines of what you are already creating

[nyplayer]

evilpenguin,

In order to avoid Transcoding the files have to be demultiplexed and then multiplexed. This will add the NAV packets and is much faster than transcoding and you keep original quality.


Demultiplex using mpgtx.exe.
then Multiplex using mplex.exe

These are free and availible. Below is a sample batch file I use.

c:\scripts\bin\mpgtx.exe -d -f D:\sage1\CommanderInChief-TiesThatBind-1777801-0.mpg

"C:\scripts\bin\mplex.exe" -f 8 -O 0ms -o "C:\CommanderInChief\CommanderInChief-TiesThatBind-1777801-0.mpg.mpg" "c:\scripts\chunk-0.m2v" "c:\scripts\chunk-0.mp2"

[evilpenguin]

Thanks man, that'll save me a lot of googling!

[evilpenguin]

For people who are playing around with this over the weekend, if you have any trouble go ahead and post your menuGen.log(might end up in C:\), qdvd.log, and qdvd.bat files for me to look at.

[mattress]

I haven't tried this addon yet, but plan on setting it up tonight when i get off work.

I just have a question. When you burn a dvd using this addon, does it include the commercials on the dvd?

if it does include the commercials, what are some ways to get rid of them?
I've read about using a little program called videoredo that can cut up the video, and recompress it to xvid or whatever over night.

can it make chapters, so you can just skip by the commercials?

if it doesn't include commercials, awesome!

Can't wait to try this out

[evilpenguin]

Yeah, the commercials are still there, but if you have comskip or SA working it'll make chapters if the commercial list files exist so you can just skip them.

The reason I'm not removing commercials is that...
a) Commercial flagging is a great convenience, but I don't trust it 100%, especially with HD material. I'd rather waste some space on the DVD rather than have the ending of a show cut off.
b) When you make cuts in videos you might be entering a world of a/v sync pain. Heck, i'm still having audio sync problems when i'm just demux/remuxing the original, uncut, video (although, I think I finally solved 'em )

[dflachbart]

Ok, I finally got my first IMG file created , but I am having trouble burning it with ImgBurn. After writing the lead-in it always hangs on 'synchronizing caches' (and the progress bars remain empty). Once it came back after 15 minutes and claimed success, but the VIDEO_TS folder on the DVD was empty. I tried it on a different burner on my other PC, but had the same problems ...

Is there any other freeware app which can burn IMG format ? I have Nero, but it doesnt seem to support it ...

Thanks,
Dirk

[dflachbart]

Oh well, it might not have anything to do with ImgBurn, I just noticed that the .img file is only 800k ...

To eliminate all other factors, I ran the perl2dvd.bat manually, and attached the output / log files to this post.

One other thing I noticed was that the bat file does not exit (so the job in DirMon2 doesn't go away either) - is the "pause" command in perl2dvd.bat intentional ?


Thanks,

Dirk

[evilpenguin]

Opps, I didn't mean to include perl2dvd.bat in the release, its just something I use to test when i'm debugging Dirmon so the terminal window doesn't disappear right away.

Oh man, and .bat file is in the Dirmon picture on the install page too, change that to perl2dvd.exe. But that doesn't look like its your main problem.

If I had to guess from the log files, it looks like menuGen.exe isn't spitting out the menus properly. Go ahead and set "Debug save files" to 1 in the menuGen preference file and, as long as you still have the videoNames.txt file, you can rerun menuGen.exe manually to see where its dying

menuGen.exe "Images_bt" "E:\Program Files\SageTV\SageTV\menuGen.pref

If everything works properly you should have a bunch of jpg's,png's, m2v's,
and mpeg's in your work folder and if you preview the jpg's they should look like the menus.

Edit: Nevermind all that, I figured out what's going on. I'll have a fix ready to go tommorow.

[evilpenguin]

5/19/06 v0.9
- Started using SageTVTranscode for sdtv demux/remux. This seems to clear up all of the issues I was having with bbdmux, mpgtx, and mplex.
- Updated version of GraphicsMagick (gm.exe) because the old version was having trouble finding it’s configurations files causing dvdauthor to error out, causing empty .img files.
- Combined perl2dvd.exe and menuGen.exe into one script/.exe because strange, strange, things were happening.
- Consolidated all of the preferences into one file, perl2dvd.pref. This will make setting this up less painful.
- All the work is done in a sub folder of your work folder to make debugging easier.
- Before deleting a work folder, I added a check to make sure there are no unexpected subfolders. This is to protect you from messing up your setting and accidentally having the script delete the wrong folder.
- All .qdvd files are now written to your work folder
- The multi and single file batch files will now be named as set in the add2dvd preference line in perl2dvd.pref and the name of the batch file will have the show title of the first video prepended to it to help you identify it
- Videos that don’t have a commercial detect file will have chapters automatically generated every using the default chapter length preference
- Added separate Comskip offset preference for SDTV because detection is usually much more accurate there.
- Added transcode stats to the logfile for my own debugging purposes
- Added better logic to determine automatically if SDTV shows need to be transcoded. This will now work properly regardless of what DVD profile you are using. Hell, you can even mix and match DVD profiles, it doesn’t matter.
- In order to lessen my dependence on Sage, video length is now being determined automatically using ffmpeg instead of with what Sage is reporting.
- Replaced full STV with a SageMC specific STVi from flachbar. Import instructions are on the download page.

In addition to everything above, I've also written a small novel on the download/instructions page entitled "I have too much free time". I encourage you to read everything because it should answer most any questions you might have.

This version is heavily tested so I have all the confidence in the world that it works. I wanna start seeing some success stories posted this weekend

[dflachbart]

Originally Posted by evilpenguin

5/19/06 v0.9
- Started using SageTVTranscode for sdtv demux/remux. This seems to clear up all of the issues I was having with bbdmux, mpgtx, and mplex.
- Updated version of GraphicsMagick (gm.exe) because the old version was having trouble finding it’s configurations files causing dvdauthor to error out, causing empty .img files.
- Combined perl2dvd.exe and menuGen.exe into one script/.exe because strange, strange, things were happening.
- Consolidated all of the preferences into one file, perl2dvd.pref. This will make setting this up less painful.
- All the work is done in a sub folder of your work folder to make debugging easier.
- Before deleting a work folder, I added a check to make sure there are no unexpected subfolders. This is to protect you from messing up your setting and accidentally having the script delete the wrong folder.
- All .qdvd files are now written to your work folder
- The multi and single file batch files will now be named as set in the add2dvd preference line in perl2dvd.pref and the name of the batch file will have the show title of the first video prepended to it to help you identify it
- Videos that don’t have a commercial detect file will have chapters automatically generated every using the default chapter length preference
- Added separate Comskip offset preference for SDTV because detection is usually much more accurate there.
- Added transcode stats to the logfile for my own debugging purposes
- Added better logic to determine automatically if SDTV shows need to be transcoded. This will now work properly regardless of what DVD profile you are using. Hell, you can even mix and match DVD profiles, it doesn’t matter.
- In order to lessen my dependence on Sage, video length is now being determined automatically using ffmpeg instead of with what Sage is reporting.
- Replaced full STV with a SageMC specific STVi from flachbar. Import instructions are on the download page.

In addition to everything above, I've also written a small novel on the download/instructions page entitled "I have too much free time". I encourage you to read everything because it should answer most any questions you might have.

This version is heavily tested so I have all the confidence in the world that it works. I wanna start seeing some success stories posted this weekend

Seems someone has been quite busy...

These changes sound quite awesome, can't wait to try it out ...


Dirk

[owilsky]

next step is a standard-stv-import? *hope*

[evilpenguin]

Originally Posted by owilsky

next step is a standard-stv-import? *hope*

I just noticed your location, I take it you'll need your DVD's in PAL format?

[owilsky]

Originally Posted by evilpenguin

I just noticed your location, I take it you'll need your DVD's in PAL format?

yes, that´s right. Why? Only NTSC possible at the moment?

[BBCritical]

Feature request: the ability to create an audio cd from mp3 files through sage

[evilpenguin]

Originally Posted by BBCritical

Feature request: the ability to create an audio cd from mp3 files through sage

Oh yeah, I remember you mentioning that earlier. I actually looked into it and while its resonably doable, I don't listen to much music so its not very high on my todo list. Maybe someday...

[evilpenguin]

Change log:
6/12/06 v1.2
* Added support for the Default STV and flachbar was awesome enough to turn it into an STVi again for me.
* Backed off the threshold on the estimated vs. reported duration because I couldn't come up with a single equation that worked for all bitrates
* Added an avi bitrate correction because at lower bitrates they transcode too large
* Added 100 kilobit penelty to videos if the previous video transcoded to large.
* All of my adjustments and magic numbers now equations instead of constants and are configurable in the advanced preference file. This means if I find a more accurate representation for any of them, people can just change their preference file instead me of having to release a whole new version.
* I'm now maintaining a stats file of every transcode. Every once and a while I may request people email this file so I can use those stats to fine tune my fancy, new, bitrate equations.
* Fixed add2DVDQ bug where it would hang if there were strange characters in the description
* Now that I've split the preference file into two I'm going to provide an upgrade pack so people who already have it don't have to download everything again.
* Added an advanced preference so you can specify a UNC path for your work folder to be used in the burning batch file. This is very handy if your network drives like to randomly disconnect, as mine do.
* Included a full set of menu pngs for first time default STV users
* Before I demux/remux a video, I create a small test DVD to check for errors. This should eliminate one of my two random, mysterious, video errors.

Note: If you are upgrading, reimport SageMC_DVD_burnImport as it has been changed a little bit.

Just a note to all the new people, make sure you read as much of the install/configuration instructions as you can stomach because I promise there is some good information lurking within my poor spelling and grammar.

Most importantly for default STV users:
* Fill out perl2dvd.pref carefully, leave the theme as "Images_bt" for now, and make sure you're work folder exists. If you have any problems go ahead and post your log files and/or preference files here on the forum and i'll do my best to get you going

Enjoy