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

[evilpenguin]

rsage-
I thought I had that stuff working, i'll check it out this weekend and see what's going on.

larryf-
Since i'm messing around in the menu generation code right now anyway, i'll play around with generating a nice CD/DVD case cover image too.

[rsagetv99]

Originally Posted by evilpenguin

rsage-
I thought I had that stuff working, i'll check it out this weekend and see what's going on.

OK, thanks. When it works, will the precommand be in the batch file?

Originally Posted by evilpenguin

larryf-
Since i'm messing around in the menu generation code right now anyway, i'll play around with generating a nice CD/DVD case cover image too.

While on the topic, is there a possibility that customized menus can be used? Like if I wanted to put "RSage's DVD Collection" somewhere on the title screen, or if I wanted to use a jpg like a downloaded copy of the movie's cover art, as the background for the main menu.

Is that possible now?

[MeInMaui]

evilpenguin,

Are there any other restrictions to the navigation icons besides being limited to 4 colors total? Is the size auto-scaled, or are they required to be a fixed size (in pixels)? I think you can see where this is going.

Mike

[evilpenguin]

Originally Posted by rsagetv99

OK, thanks. When it works, will the precommand be in the batch file?


While on the topic, is there a possibility that customized menus can be used? Like if I wanted to put "RSage's DVD Collection" somewhere on the title screen, or if I wanted to use a jpg like a downloaded copy of the movie's cover art, as the background for the main menu.

Is that possible now?

- The precommand will be launched from within the script and you should be able to look in the logfile and see the command being launched. But like I said, I haven't looked at that section of code for a while, so it may not even be working

[evilpenguin]

Woot, finally some people interested in doing some menu customization

rsage - I'm currently working on using the auto cover art look up with the menus, but it's not quite there yet. As for customizing the background of your DVD's there are two ways you can do that...

a) Copy the background image, background.png, of your theme and save it as a new image, modify it to say/look how you want, and then use the full path to your new background in the menuGen.override file to override the default background.

b) Create a new image, about the same size as the hp_start.png and override the top or bottom logo to point to your image.

meInMaui - If your working on a custum menu, consider my PM box your bat-phone if you need anything

As for the nav buttons, I auto-scale them vertically to about 55 px (i'll get a more exact number for you tommorow), but I don't do any horizontal scaling so the buttons can an go all the way across the screen (just make sure not to cover the text ). In addition you can use different buttons for the submenu and the main menu.

That's really all I can think of for now, but i'm working on updating the menu customization part of the install page and that should help a lot. In addition, if you download the menu pack off of the sage download page it has good example menuGen.override files.

[MeInMaui]

Thanks evilpenguin,

At first I'll probably just try to soup up your existing navigation icons. I should be able to do that pretty quickly. I won't have a chance to play with custom menus for a bit as I have a bunch of other graphics projects on the old ToDo list that I want to wrap up first. You know how it is. There is so much I want to do, but so little time. I don't even get to watch TV anymore!!!

Mike

[evilpenguin]

Originally Posted by MeInMaui

Thanks evilpenguin,

At first I'll probably just try to soup up your existing navigation icons. I should be able to do that pretty quickly. I won't have a chance to play with custom menus for a bit as I have a bunch of other graphics projects on the old ToDo list that I want to wrap up first. You know how it is. There is so much I want to do, but so little time. I don't even get to watch TV anymore!!!

Mike

haha, don't worry about it, I just got a little over excited there

If you give me a few days, I can get together a really simple test setup for you so you can quickly check to see if your images are DVD complient and how they look as DVD menus, both as mock ups and in Sage, without having to waste time burning stuff. It won't be any trouble either as I need to set it up for myself too so that I start doing some improvments to the menu generation code.

[gand]

Hi,

I'd like to do a demux/remux rather than a full transcode as this should be much quicker (and my dvd player can play mpegs).

Only thing is I can't seem to find a way of telling it not to transcode - is it a case of just flicking a switch somewhere?

Apologies if this is answered somewhere else in this thread, but did a search and couldn't find anything.

Thanks in advance,
Gand

[evilpenguin]

Opps, sorry I fogot to respond to your PM, i've got a lot on my plate right now

When the script decides that your video needs to be transcoded instead of de/re-muxed its because it detected an error in the video that needs to be smoothed out by re-encoding it, other wise it will error out in dvdAuthor. You can tell this by looking in your log files for a line that says

Error found in test DVD, forcing transcode

[MeInMaui]

Originally Posted by evilpenguin

haha, don't worry about it, I just got a little over excited there

If you give me a few days, I can get together a really simple test setup for you so you can quickly check to see if your images are DVD complient and how they look as DVD menus, both as mock ups and in Sage, without having to waste time burning stuff. It won't be any trouble either as I need to set it up for myself too so that I start doing some improvments to the menu generation code.

That sounds great. Thanks EP.

Mike

[evilpenguin]

http://download.sage.tv/api/sage/api/TranscodeAPI.html

This looks like it's been updated a bit since the last time I looked at it. Originally I thought it was for the MVP or the Placeshifter so I wasn't worried, but judging from the AddTranscodeJob() function this looks to be some type of TV show compression system.

Maybe I should stop working on adding xvid compression to the next version of this plugin until I get a look at that 5.1 feature list...

[Bryann]

Just to let you know EP, the problem with the images not showing up in the Other Programs folder was caused by the 1.2.2 stvi you included in the perl2dvd zip. I went back to the plain 1.2 version download and it works fine now.

[evilpenguin]

Originally Posted by Bryann

Just to let you know EP, the problem with the images not showing up in the Other Programs folder was caused by the 1.2.2 stvi you included in the perl2dvd zip. I went back to the plain 1.2 version download and it works fine now.

thanks for the heads up

todoList++

[evilpenguin]

Inspired (read: not to be outdone ) by Jason's great SageMC installer I'm working on making one for this plugin. Prepare for things to get much less "intense" by Friday.

[evilpenguin]

Well, I spent most of last night picking apart Sage’s built in compression with my trusty Trojan ffmpeg and I have to say, for the most part they did a good job. Some things I noticed in no particular order…

• I like how they are capturing thumbnails for the videos; I should copy that for my DVD menu’s
• They could get better thumbnails if they were mindful of the comskip files
• No 2-pass
• No mp3 audio for the xvid's (Can prolly add in sage.properties file)
• Uses ffmpeg
• Re-encoding AC3 instead of copying
• I didn’t know ffmpeg had a ‘-priority’ switch
• What does ‘-stdinctrl’ do?
• How the heck are they determining the % done while the file is transcoding?
• I like the option to compress all the videos in a series
• No option to auto-compress favorites?
• I really like the STV integration, much better than what I was working on
• To swap files in place they still have to forge the file modified date

After pondering for a while, I decided that, while their implementation is great for the average users, I think it lacks the options that power users like me crave. From that perspective I think what I’m currently working on still has something to offer the community so I’m gonna keep plowing ahead. Most likely the first release, v1.5, will only have very barebones support for in-place compression, however, once I’ve cleared out all the bugs I’ll work on trying to match the default compression scheme’s UI intergration.

[evilpenguin]

Ignoring the glaring inconsistencies, or :...

[MeInMaui]

EP,

How about putting the screencap in the lower right corner mirroring the buttons? That space is totally unused and then you wouldn't have to worry about moving the right margin of your description text so it doesn't overlap the image. Overall I really like the concept. Very cool!

Aloha,
Mike

[evilpenguin]

Originally Posted by MeInMaui

EP,

How about putting the screencap in the lower right corner mirroring the buttons? That space is totally unused and then you wouldn't have to worry about moving the right margin of your description text so it doesn't overlap the image. Overall I really like the concept. Very cool!

Aloha,
Mike

I like that idea, i'll give it a shot

[MeInMaui]

That looks pretty good! Here is another thought I just had. You could place the screencap centered along the bottom and then put the 'Main Menu' button on the left and the 'Play Show' button on the right (or vice versa). That would have a nice symmetric look to it. I hope you don't mind. I'm just throwing out silly ideas as they come to me.

Aloha,
Mike

[evilpenguin]

Originally Posted by MeInMaui

That looks pretty good! Here is another thought I just had. You could place the screencap centered along the bottom and then put the 'Main Menu' button on the left and the 'Play Show' button on the right (or vice versa). That would have a nice symmetric look to it. I hope you don't mind. I'm just throwing out silly ideas as they come to me.

Aloha,
Mike

np, ideas are exactly what i'm looking for.

That'd look nice, but the way I wrote my code I can't stack buttons horizontally, only vertically. I could keep them with the same vertical alignment and just move one to the other side, but that looks a little weird.