BurnDVDX2 support issues.

[vmq]

Here is the fix for the four lines of captions in the srt file.
Let me know if this works ok.
The dll goes in gbpvr\plugins\burndvdx2
I'll update the install also.

Thanks, works like a charm now.

And with <SrtOffsetTime>0</SrtOffsetTime> the subtitles appear where they are supposed to be. I have no idea why there should be a 5 sec difference to your system. But it works, that's what counts.

Volker

P.S.: For debugging subtitle / appearance related issues there is no need to generate an iso or even burn a DVD. Would it be possible to just generate the VIDEO_TS directory? Maybe if no burn program is selected in the plugin settings?

[pastro]

Thanks, works like a charm now.

And with <SrtOffsetTime>0</SrtOffsetTime> the subtitles appear where they are supposed to be. I have no idea why there should be a 5 sec difference to your system. But it works, that's what counts.

Volker

P.S.: For debugging subtitle / appearance related issues there is no need to generate an iso or even burn a DVD. Would it be possible to just generate the VIDEO_TS directory? Maybe if no burn program is selected in the plugin settings?

It seems like I had to add the delay when I started using mencoder. I'll revisit this and see if the ffmpeg and mencoder end up with different offsets. I'll default the offset to 0 in the next version anyway.

I could have the create ISO button change meaning to either generate an ISO or just the video_ts dir with the left/right arrow. That way I don't need another button which there isn't room for. Similar to the way the folder.jpg and filename.jpg is changed in skiptool.

[TWX]

Hey. New to GBPVR and to the plugin, but I really like what I see. I did have a problem, though, with something during the imgburn part of the process when I was attempting to record a 7GB programme onto a dual-layer disc. I can't remember off the top of my head exactly verbatim what the error message was, but imgburn said something about being unable to find any cells that could be used for a layer break, and something odd about crying and the end of the world, and a prompt to continue anyway or not. The disc that I burned this way didn't play in my regular component DVD player. I did later burn a different short movie on to a single layer disc and that did function properly.

A couple of suggestions, if I may be so bold:

The menu options "Captions ON", "Enable 16x9", "SmsMode ON", and "Preview ON" are somewhat confusing, as at a glance they make it look like these features are those currently enabled. You might want to consider adding a color-changing icon notifier next to each of the toggle options (green for on, unlit for off), or to add "is" or "are", and changing wording to something like "Captions are ON"/"Captions are OFF", "16x9 Enabled"/"16x9 Disabled", "SmsMode is ON"/"SmsMode is OFF", etc. This is a personal preference, but I'd imagine that a lot of people new to the software are confused.

It would also be nice, if it's reasonably feasible, to have an option to shrink a slightly-oversized recording, even if it means a mild reduction in quality, to fit on a given sized disc. I've been recording everything in high quality mode, and two-hour programmes are too large to fit on a single layer disc, and it'd be nice to be able to take something that's less than 5.5GB and get it onto an inexpensive 4.7GB disc. If this already works somehow I haven't found any documentation to acknowledge it, so I admit that it could be my confusion rather than any missing feature.

I do like the program though. it's definitely less clunky than the commercial program that I've used in the past as far as setting start and end times, and inserting chapter breaks in concert with commercial breaks makes a lot of sense...

EDIT: Well, looks like I was a tad premature in my criticism of the imgburn dialog. The DL disc failed to play in my DV-C302D three disc changer that's a little older and also failed to play in the burner that burned it in the PC with PowerDVD, but played in my cheapo Cyberhome DVD player. So, I don't yet know what's going on there. Funny enough, it also burned it to 4.6GB, so it might have fit on a single-layer DVD disc. I'll have to keep playing to see what I can get to happen.

[pastro]

Hey. New to GBPVR and to the plugin, but I really like what I see. I did have a problem, though, with something during the imgburn part of the process when I was attempting to record a 7GB programme onto a dual-layer disc. I can't remember off the top of my head exactly verbatim what the error message was, but imgburn said something about being unable to find any cells that could be used for a layer break, and something odd about crying and the end of the world, and a prompt to continue anyway or not. The disc that I burned this way didn't play in my regular component DVD player. I did later burn a different short movie on to a single layer disc and that did function properly.

A couple of suggestions, if I may be so bold:

The menu options "Captions ON", "Enable 16x9", "SmsMode ON", and "Preview ON" are somewhat confusing, as at a glance they make it look like these features are those currently enabled. You might want to consider adding a color-changing icon notifier next to each of the toggle options (green for on, unlit for off), or to add "is" or "are", and changing wording to something like "Captions are ON"/"Captions are OFF", "16x9 Enabled"/"16x9 Disabled", "SmsMode is ON"/"SmsMode is OFF", etc. This is a personal preference, but I'd imagine that a lot of people new to the software are confused.

It would also be nice, if it's reasonably feasible, to have an option to shrink a slightly-oversized recording, even if it means a mild reduction in quality, to fit on a given sized disc. I've been recording everything in high quality mode, and two-hour programmes are too large to fit on a single layer disc, and it'd be nice to be able to take something that's less than 5.5GB and get it onto an inexpensive 4.7GB disc. If this already works somehow I haven't found any documentation to acknowledge it, so I admit that it could be my confusion rather than any missing feature.

I do like the program though. it's definitely less clunky than the commercial program that I've used in the past as far as setting start and end times, and inserting chapter breaks in concert with commercial breaks makes a lot of sense...

EDIT: Well, looks like I was a tad premature in my criticism of the imgburn dialog. The DL disc failed to play in my DV-C302D three disc changer that's a little older and also failed to play in the burner that burned it in the PC with PowerDVD, but played in my cheapo Cyberhome DVD player. So, I don't yet know what's going on there. Funny enough, it also burned it to 4.6GB, so it might have fit on a single-layer DVD disc. I'll have to keep playing to see what I can get to happen.

Not sure about the double layer disks. I don't test it that way. You might try nero as an alternative. I can't remember but there might be an option that I don't use that would enable double layer. Have to look into that as I get time.

I know what you mean about the captions on etc. I have never liked the way I did that. On a 4:3 display I ran out of room to add more characters and keep the button text the same size. I'll come up with something better on the next release.

The shrink part is something I've been looking at. DVDshrink doesn't have a true command line, but I found an autoit script that does run it so that might be feasible. If you know of a different way to shrink a DVD let me know.

[TWX]

I'm very new into this PVR thing. Most of what I have, media-wise, is on Laserdisc, and most of my wife's stuff is on VHS, so we built the PVR to give us something to let us take our movies on the laptops when we travel...

I just finished my first attempt at burning Battlestar Galactica Razor to archive it. I misinterpreted what 16x9 meant; I thought it was a mask to apply to the video to drop the bars at the top and bottom. Whoops. I guess that this'll be the bring-with-me version as PC DVD software can let me change the aspect ratio so that it's scaled correctly.

In my attempts to figure out how to encode and compress my recordings I came across some info somewhere about masking off the black bars and discarding them when converting video. I'll have to look into that further, and dig into the shell scripts that GBPVR and your utility use to see if there's a way to call upon them. I know that there's no easy way to do that if one's writing from scratch as you are, so I wouldn't presume to ask for that as a built in feature unless one of the conversion processing utilities supports it. Ultimately I'd like to be able to record a show, and then if it's one I want to archive offline, tell the computer to strip it to widescreen if possible (so that my widescreen laptop doesn't have a teensy little image in the middle), convert it and shrink if necessary, and then write to DVD.

I manually selected my commercial skip locations before burning. It worked pretty well. I had to figure out that the various breaks were selectable in the second column, and how selecting them affected the buttons in the first column, but after some playing I got it to work.

Thanks again for devoting your personal time to something that isn't financially benefiting you...

[pastro]

I'm very new into this PVR thing. Most of what I have, media-wise, is on Laserdisc, and most of my wife's stuff is on VHS, so we built the PVR to give us something to let us take our movies on the laptops when we travel...

I just finished my first attempt at burning Battlestar Galactica Razor to archive it. I misinterpreted what 16x9 meant; I thought it was a mask to apply to the video to drop the bars at the top and bottom. Whoops. I guess that this'll be the bring-with-me version as PC DVD software can let me change the aspect ratio so that it's scaled correctly.

In my attempts to figure out how to encode and compress my recordings I came across some info somewhere about masking off the black bars and discarding them when converting video. I'll have to look into that further, and dig into the shell scripts that GBPVR and your utility use to see if there's a way to call upon them. I know that there's no easy way to do that if one's writing from scratch as you are, so I wouldn't presume to ask for that as a built in feature unless one of the conversion processing utilities supports it. Ultimately I'd like to be able to record a show, and then if it's one I want to archive offline, tell the computer to strip it to widescreen if possible (so that my widescreen laptop doesn't have a teensy little image in the middle), convert it and shrink if necessary, and then write to DVD.

I manually selected my commercial skip locations before burning. It worked pretty well. I had to figure out that the various breaks were selectable in the second column, and how selecting them affected the buttons in the first column, but after some playing I got it to work.

Thanks again for devoting your personal time to something that isn't financially benefiting you...

Let me know what you come up with on the 16:9. I can probably build it in.
I changed how the skiptool works recently and you shouldn't have to select the skippairs in the second column. They should automatically be selected depending on where you are in the video. You can manually select them, but it's easier to use auto mode. There are a number of hotkeys that make entering the skippairs much easier as well. You might want to glance at the wiki entry for skiptool. That might help make it easier to enter or modify skippairs.

You know you can also cut commercials if you want to as it creates the disk. I like to mark the commercials and then cut them out as it authors the dvd.

[kayak4ever]

It would also be nice, if it's reasonably feasible, to have an option to shrink a slightly-oversized recording, even if it means a mild reduction in quality, to fit on a given sized disc. I've been recording everything in high quality mode, and two-hour programmes are too large to fit on a single layer disc, and it'd be nice to be able to take something that's less than 5.5GB and get it onto an inexpensive 4.7GB disc. If this already works somehow I haven't found any documentation to acknowledge it, so I admit that it could be my confusion rather than any missing feature.

I know that I can generally get 2 hours on a single layer disc but I was hoping that there were enough commercials that would be cut out to get the full movie on one disc (The movie I was trying to burn was A Perfect World, which has a stated time of 138 min). It wasn't clear to me whether the plugin still needs space for the commercials that were cut out. However, what would be nice, in addition to shrinking by lowering the quality, is a way of knowing before the end of the burn process that the size is too big. If the single program is too big, could there be an option to "use two discs"? If the project is too big because I have tried to add too many programs, it is easy for me to delete the excess episodes, but if it is a single program, as in the case of my 138 minute movie that was broadcast over 3 hours, it would be nice to be able to break the movie in half so that I am sure that I got the whole movie on the two discs (or opt to use the dual layer disc).

A short note to TWX to look at the enhanced web administration plugin. I haven't used its full capabilities yet, but it looks like you could also watch all your programs on your laptop when you travel, provided that you have internet access.

[pastro]

I know that I can generally get 2 hours on a single layer disc but I was hoping that there were enough commercials that would be cut out to get the full movie on one disc (The movie I was trying to burn was A Perfect World, which has a stated time of 138 min). It wasn't clear to me whether the plugin still needs space for the commercials that were cut out. However, what would be nice, in addition to shrinking by lowering the quality, is a way of knowing before the end of the burn process that the size is too big. If the single program is too big, could there be an option to "use two discs"? If the project is too big because I have tried to add too many programs, it is easy for me to delete the excess episodes, but if it is a single program, as in the case of my 138 minute movie that was broadcast over 3 hours, it would be nice to be able to break the movie in half so that I am sure that I got the whole movie on the two discs (or opt to use the dual layer disc).

A short note to TWX to look at the enhanced web administration plugin. I haven't used its full capabilities yet, but it looks like you could also watch all your programs on your laptop when you travel, provided that you have internet access.

There are three comskip options:
Don't do anything - Sets chapter times every three minutes.
Assign chapter times to comskip commercial end times.
Cut commercials using mencoder then set chapter times to every three minutes.
If you select the third option, the commercials are removed completely.

I don't know if there is a clean way to disk span since I don't think dvdauthor supports it.

I don't know the exact disk size because of the re-encoding process so I only list the file size before reencoding. Because of the nature of how a script is generated to do all the processing, it would be cumbersome to get the plugin to change something while it is processing the disk. Shrinking the disk or making the upfront decision to go dual layer is the "easiest" option. I'll look further into that.
I really like EWA, but streaming from my home network is too slow. I have a 400k uplink but the picture is pretty crappy. Your mileage might be different if you have a faster uplink.
Downloading the program is a viable but slow option. Another option is to just create a bunch of ISOs and play them directly. Course you need the disk space on your laptop which I never have.

[TWX]

A short note to TWX to look at the enhanced web administration plugin. I haven't used its full capabilities yet, but it looks like you could also watch all your programs on your laptop when you travel, provided that you have internet access.

Yeah, I don't permit incoming unsolicited connections into my home network. I used to have a Linux box routing all of the traffic, but it's been years since I had all that setup, back when I had a static IP and full DNS control. It'd be too much of a risk routing an incoming port to a Windows machine anyway IMHO.

[bigC]

I seem to be getting poor video quality when I use the commercial trim option to cut out the commercials. Whenever there's movement on the screen.. everything gets a kind of blur or more like a slight jitter. Its hard to describe. Does anyone else get this? :confused:

If I just mark the commercials as chapters, everything is good.