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

[geogecko]

Okay, I'm posting, because no one has told you "good job," and given you a pat on the back...

I need to get a DVD burner now...

[Morgan111]

Very Nice!

However.... When running it I ran into a problem after transcoding. A message box popped up:

dvdauthor.exe - Unable to locate component
This application has failed to start because cygwin1.dll was not found. Re-installing the application may fix this problem.


Is there a certain subset of cygwin that must be installed? I guess that would be necessary to run the perl script?

[evilpenguin]

Bah, i'm sorry, I forgot to include a file, cygwin1.dll. Try re-downloading it.

There's a little strangeness with cygwin1.dll. If already have full cygwin installed on your machine (like I do on my dev machine) it won't run with this file, but if you don't have cygwin it won't run without it. I'll have to add something about that on the install page.

Thanks for the props, I'd be lying if I said I wasn't hoping for a few

[JUC]

Originally Posted by geogecko

Okay, I'm posting, because no one has told you "good job," and given you a pat on the back...

I need to get a DVD burner now...

A little delayed-but good job! This looks great. I'm thinking of building a client just because of this feature now so i can get the MVP out of the living room and get a full client with burner back in.

great
JUC

[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!

[Morgan111]

Ok, generated a DVD-RW from a 15 min program as a test with no problem. When I tried to create a DVD from a 3 hour show it created a file that was 5MB. When I told it to create the DVD it failed because the file was too big.

Is there an option I can change so that it will automatically limit it to the size of a single layer DVD or are we limited based on recording quality and length?

Also, is there any easy way to have the script change the process priority to below normal. I am running it on my standalone server and don't know that it causes any conflict, but I would rather run it lower just to play it a little safer.

Looking forward to the next revision!

[evilpenguin]

Originally Posted by Morgan111

Ok, generated a DVD-RW from a 15 min program as a test with no problem. When I tried to create a DVD from a 3 hour show it created a file that was 5MB. When I told it to create the DVD it failed because the file was too big.

Is there an option I can change so that it will automatically limit it to the size of a single layer DVD or are we limited based on recording quality and length?

Also, is there any easy way to have the script change the process priority to below normal. I am running it on my standalone server and don't know that it causes any conflict, but I would rather run it lower just to play it a little safer.

Looking forward to the next revision!

I'm hopping that you mean 5GB because that at least means all my program calls are working properly. If that's the case then the fix is on the way in the next version where I actually take into account the length of the show when setting the bittrate instead of just blindly setting it to 7800. If it is 5MB, though, let me know more details about the show because I haven't tested anything longer than an hour yet.

As for the priority, I'll definitely put that onto the todo list. I don't know how to manipulate win32 processes in PERL yet, but I've been dying for an excuse to learn. I'll prolly get to that once everything is working perfectly and i'm cleaning up the script.

Right now my entire todo list to reach 1.0 is...
- Get dynamically generated menus working. I didn't originally want to use menus because they complicate things, but its the only way I can make highly compatible DVD's with shows that have different aspect ratios and audio formats.
- Conditionally not processing SD shows if they'll fit fine onto the DVD without it.
- Clean up my process launching so I can capture the output to file, manage the priority, and catch error conditions better.
- Make the transcoding process 100% configurable by the preference file to the point that you could choose to use a different CLI encoding program without re-compiling the script.
- Create the option to have the STV kick off the dvd creation process if you are doing everything on the same computer that you are scheduling.

[evilpenguin]

5/2/06 v0.5
-Gave script a complete make over
-Created permanent .exe’s
-Added support for multifile DVD’s
-Added dynamic bitrate calculations to try and fit everything onto a DVD
-Temporary borrowed (read: completely stole) kjake’s awesome dynamic DVD menu code. I’m working on some custom MCE style menus for my next release, but in the meantime I’d like to have something out there for people to enjoy (and test)

[Morgan111]

Thanks for the update! I'm running it with a large file now.

It looks like there is now an add2dvdq.pref file that has one parameter, multiDVDPath. Should that be set to some kind of scratchpad directory?

[evilpenguin]

Opps forgot about that.

The 'add2dvdq.pref' file contains a single parameter that points to the directory to keep the multifile dvd working lists and .qdvd files. You can set that up anywhere you like, just make sure that if you are using dirmon, you add that to the directory list.

[evilpenguin]

5/8/06 v0.6
-Added menuGen.exe which generates dynamic menus for DVD’s
-Modified STV to output basic show information for DVD menus. I also renamed my STV to SageMC_16×9_burnmod.xml so you don’t have to overwrite your original, just in case I screw anything up.
-Tweaked the bitrate calculations a bit more to make them more accurate. In my experience the script does a very good job of fitting the shows into the DVD size, but it cuts it very close. I would almost recommend that you set your DVD size lower, like 4.6, just to be safe.

[evilpenguin]

5/9/06 v0.7
- Added SDTV demux/remux. To use, fill in the new property “Digital Channels” with the numbers of the channels that are NOT being recorded using a Hauppauge Card with DVD recording profile. However, if the calculated bitrate would produce a smaller file than the demux/remux then the file is transcoded as before. Using the default settings you can add upto roughly 1.5 hours of video and not have it transcode the SDTV.

[evilpenguin]

I'm having pretty big reliablity issues with the SDTV demux/remuxing. For now, I highly recommend setting your SDTV bitrate threshold above your max bitrate (~8000) to disable it.

[evilpenguin]

5/12/06 v0.8
- Started using bbdmux for demuxing SDTV. This appears to fix the reliability issue I described above.
- Removed Digital Channel preference as i’m now using ffmpeg to automatically determine if a video is in the correct format.
- Fixed a bug where multifile dvd images would over write each other.

Also, now that things are working pretty darn good, I've posted a poll to help me decide where to go next with this project. I would really appreciate the input

[pcuoco]

I posted in the poll that I don't have a DVD burner in my HTPC... yet.

You've left me no excuse but to go buy one now.