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

[dflachbart]

Originally Posted by evilpenguin

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

I just switched over to SageMC a week ago, and now that I got everything to my liking and up and running I'll try out your mod on the weekend. Have been looking for DVD burning functionality for recorded stuff for quite a while ...

If I get this working, it'll rock ...

Dirk

[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]

Since everyone is having the same problem, I thought I'd explain it really fast.

When Dirmon2 kicks off a process, it runs it from the "C:\Windows\System32". I thought this wasn't a problem since I was using full paths everywhere I could, but the program I use to generate the menus, gm.exe, apparently is still too stupid to find its own configuration files . This was causing the menuGen to fail, which in turn caused an avalanche of failures which ended with having an empty, worthless, .img file. The reason I never noticed it before was that I was kicking off perl2dvd.exe manually instead of letting Dirmon2 do it.

I'm working on a fix and I should have something out by Tuesday. Until then, letting dirmon2 kick off your perl2dvd.exe will fail 100% of the time

In the meantime, if you want to see this thing actually work (I swear to god it does), you can open up a command prompt, change directory into your SageTV folder, and launch it manually with the full path to your .qdvd file in quotes as the first parameter...

perl2dvd.exe "J:\DVD\dvdList.qdvd"

[owilsky]

I just voted. Please make it an import so I can use this with the standard sage3.stv

From what I saw in your screenshots: Nice work!

[evilpenguin]

Originally Posted by owilsky

I just voted. Please make it an import so I can use this with the standard sage3.stv

From what I saw in your screenshots: Nice work!

Step 1 - Make it work
Step 2 - Make it work in SageMC 16x9
Step 3 - Make it work everywhere

I actually do have a SageMC only STVi of this, courtesy of flachbar, which i'll get around to testing and releasing really soon.

[dflachbart]

Originally Posted by evilpenguin

In the meantime, if you want to see this thing actually work (I swear to god it does), you can open up a command prompt, change directory into your SageTV folder, and launch it manually with the full path to your .qdvd file in quotes as the first parameter...

perl2dvd.exe "J:\DVD\dvdList.qdvd"

Ok, this gets me much further, but still not quite there ...

I get the following error:

   E:\Video\SageTV\SageTV>perl2dvd.exe \\mediapc\recordings\TheOffice-CasinoNight-8
15914-0.qdvd
   ...
   INFO: [???] BUFFERING min 15 Buf max 137095
   INFO: [???] AUDIO_STATISTICS: c0
   INFO: [???] Audio stream length 123772320 bytes.
   INFO: [???] Syncwords      :   107442
   INFO: [???] Frames         :   107442 padded
   INFO: [???] Frames         :        0 unpadded
   INFO: [???] BUFFERING min 15 Buf max 1163
   INFO: [???] MUX STATUS: no under-runs detected.
/cygdrive/e/Video/SageTV/SageTV/perl2DVD/gm convert: Unable to open file (E:\Vid
eo\SageTV\SageTV\STVs\SageTV3\SageMCE\\\mediapc\recordings\TheOffice-CasinoNight
-815914-0.qdvd\background.png) [No such file or directory].
/cygdrive/e/Video/SageTV/SageTV/perl2DVD/gm composite: Unable to open file (E:\V
ideo\tmp\menuBackground.png) [No such file or directory].
/cygdrive/e/Video/SageTV/SageTV/perl2DVD/gm composite: Unable to open file (E:\V
ideo\tmp\menuBackground.png) [No such file or directory].
/cygdrive/e/Video/SageTV/SageTV/perl2DVD/gm composite: Unable to open file (E:\V
ideo\tmp\menuBackground.png) [No such file or directory].
/cygdrive/e/Video/SageTV/SageTV/perl2DVD/gm composite: Unable to open file (E:\V
ideo\tmp\menuBackground.png) [No such file or directory].
/cygdrive/e/Video/SageTV/SageTV/perl2DVD/gm composite: Unable to open file (E:\V
ideo\tmp\menuBackground.png) [No such file or directory].
/cygdrive/e/Video/SageTV/SageTV/perl2DVD/gm convert: Unable to open file (E:\Vid
eo\SageTV\SageTV\STVs\SageTV3\SageMCE\\\mediapc\recordings\TheOffice-CasinoNight
-815914-0.qdvd\background.png) [No such file or directory].
/cygdrive/e/Video/SageTV/SageTV/perl2DVD/gm composite: Unable to open file (E:\V
ideo\tmp\subMenuBackground.0.png) [No such file or directory].

Are UNC paths not supported ? But even if I had it mapped, the path to the background.png would still be incorrect ...? Or is some other configuration setting wrong ?


Thanks,
Dirk

[evilpenguin]

??? Wow, that's a new one...

"\\mediapc\recordings\TheOffice-CasinoNight-815914-0.qdvd", is the first parameter from perl2dvd.exe, but that's the output from menuGen.exe. It should never even see that variable. The software i'm using to compile the perl scripts into exe is prolly doing something wonky. S'all right, what i'm working on right now should be able to fix all of that.

I'm piecing together a proper testbed tonight and I'll test my new build on a fresh install of XP and SageTV. Hopefully that will prevent anymore... surprises

[dflachbart]

Originally Posted by evilpenguin

??? Wow, that's a new one...

"\\mediapc\recordings\TheOffice-CasinoNight-815914-0.qdvd", is the first parameter from perl2dvd.exe, but that's the output from menuGen.exe. It should never even see that variable. The software i'm using to compile the perl scripts into exe is prolly doing something wonky. S'all right, what i'm working on right now should be able to fix all of that.

I'm piecing together a proper testbed tonight and I'll test my new build on a fresh install of XP and SageTV. Hopefully that will prevent anymore... surprises

Is it possible that it somehow gets screwed up because I have cygwin installed on my machine ?

Anyway, I can wait for the next update ...

Thanks,
Dirk

[evilpenguin]

I sure hope not, because I have Cygwin installed on all of my machines too

[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?

[evilpenguin]

Yep, NTSC only, but not intentionally. It shouldn't take much to make PAL/NTSC configurable by option. I'll put it on the todo list.


... no one here is SECAM... right