Monday, September 27, 2010

The Phantom Forced Subtitles

I finally got around to re-doing my Star Wars 1: The Phantom Menace DVD this weekend. I had to fix the forced subtitles. And unfortunately, I discovered that for some reason SubRip was unable to read the subtitles off the 'forced' track that is on the DVD.

As I've noted in earlier posts, on the Star Wars DVDs, the forced subtitles tend to be on the second 'English' subtitle track on the DVD.

I haven't had any problems with the other Star Wars DVD's, so I was rather annoyed that it wasn't working for The Phantom Menace. I never figured it out either.

I managed to find a copy of a good SRT for the forced subs, and I've put it on my blog for anyone else that is interested. 

So, with SRT in hand, I used RipBot264 as described in my 'Complicated' instructions and managed to get a good backup of the movie.

Tuesday, September 21, 2010

WinX DVD Ripper Platinum for the win!

When you just need to rip a normal DVD (no subtitles, maybe some episodes, nothing fancy), then WinX DVD Ripper is your best friend.

It makes a great WMV file with its default settings, and lets you easily pick out the movies or playlists that you want to burn. I had the easiest time backing up some old Magic School Bus DVD's for my daughter. For the simple jobs, it is an excellent tool!

Sunday, September 19, 2010

RipBot264 doesn't always like DVD angles

While re-doing Star Wars 2 - Attack of the Clones, RipBot264 kept erroring out on me when trying to run an index against the DVD itself or my initial file-based rip.

Turns out, it didn't have any problem after I used DVD Decrypter to strip away all the extra angles used in the initial text scrolling. I can only assume that sometimes, RipBot264 can't handle multiple angle streams very well.

Anyway, after decrypting and getting my subtitles, the backup worked beautifully. Notably, Episode 2 did not require any deinterlacing.

Thursday, September 16, 2010

New Tool - TxMuxer

I used a new tool last night to finally accomplish a task that has been bugging me for almost a year. I've been trying to use free tools to combine the 2 halves of the extended edition Lord of the Rings movies into one long movie to play on my Windows Media Center.

I finally found the last tool that let me finish doing this. TsMuxer.

Of course, I needed to figure out the deinterlacing thing first, in RipBot264 in order accomplish this. Once I got that part figured out, TsMuxer easily, and quickly, joined the two .m2ts files created when I backed up each DVD.

Lovely.

I'm created a set of instructions for all the steps to convert the 2 DVD movies into one large AVCHD (.m2ts) movie. I've posted it here, under examples.

Wednesday, September 15, 2010

Forced Subs

I'm going to have to re-do Star Wars episodes 1 and 2, because I didn't know how to do the forced subs properly when I did them the first time. I also didn't really know how to use Ripbot264. They were among the first movies that I backed up.

That said, I'm still annoyed.

To help, I found this (clearly incomplete), online spreadsheet linked off TheGreenButton, that is a list of movies that contain forced English subtitles. Some even have notes with regards to what manner they are 'forced' in the movie. (seperate track, forced tag, embeded in video, etc..)

Admittedly, its not a perfect list, but it has some of the more popular recent titles and seems to be relativly actively maintained, at least as far as is indicated on the TheGreenButton. (It is apparently open for public editing as well)

Monday, September 13, 2010

Slow Weekend

This weekend had a lot of distractions related to a 4 year old and her new bicycle. So nothing really excited happened on the Convertin' front.

I have decided, however, that it would be worthwhile for someone to make it a lot easier to determine if there are forced (english) subtitles in movies. I've been looking back at some of my old conversions, and noticing missing subtitles that it just didn't occur to me would be there.

Movies like, Iron Man, Star Wars Ep 2, maybe episode 1 and 3 too, have been played again recently through my Media Center only to note the missing subtitles. I shall have to ponder the best way to deal with this.

Friday, September 10, 2010

Deinterlacing - RipBot264 and DVD's

Last night I decided that I wanted to re-do my Cars backup.

I had a nice WMV version of the movie, done by Win X DVD Ripper Platinum, but I got annoyed at the end of the movie when the lamborghini is talking in Italian and there was no subtitle associated with it.

Looking at the actual movie, there is no subtitle there either. But I wanted one, and its my copy, so I decided to re-do it with a translated subtitle there. :)

So, I used SubRip pointed out to me there are no forced subtitles in Cars for English. And that when it shows all subtitles, it just gives the straight Italian. So, I had to translate that and put together my own SRT file with just the 2 relevant lines in it.

The next trick was actually ripping it with RipBot264 so that I could insert the subtitles. This is when I learned about deinterlacing.

Often (but not always), when I rip DVD's with RipBot264 I would get an annoying effect in the video. I found out it is called Combing, and it looks something like this: (image from wikipedia.com, deinterlace article)

As you can see in the image, there are these odd horizontal lines, and can be really annoying when you are watching the movie. I'm not going to go into why  those lines show up, or why they only show up for some movies. You can go to wikipedia to learn about that. I'm going to tell you how I dealt with them, and will deal with them in the future.

Ripbot264 has a nice little toggle in its UI to optionally allow you to do deinterlacing. When converting a DVD to AVCHD for the purpose of watching through your XBox media extender, I suggest taking the following steps:

1. Configure your movie conversion per normal, setting up subtitles as appropriate.
2. Check the 'Preview Movie' in the dialog that comes up under 'Properties' when configuring a movie. If you see the 'combing' then you will need to deinterlace. If you don't see the coming, then you don't need to. (for example, with my Star Wars movies, I did not need to deinterlace)
3. Set your deinterlace option.
       a. Try "Inverse Telecine" first. Then check the preview and see how it looks. If it looks good. Keep it.
       b. If "Inverse Telecine" does not look good, then try both of the 29.97 fps setting, picking the one that looks best to you in the preview. I've heard Top Field First (TFF) is better, but go with what you like
4. Finish out the dialogs and start converting.

If you have any other suggestions, or reasons why what I'm reccomending is not the best idea, let me know.

Thursday, September 9, 2010

Really quickly.. that fixed it!

Real quick post, now that I'm home. I applied the codec pack below (with its default settings) and everything seems honky-dory again.

Windows Media Player can play my .m2ts files again without the buzzing, even the Star Wars ones.

Hooray!

Buzzing noise in Windows Media Player

Remember how I mentioned in my "Victory" post that I was getting an odd buzzing in Windows Media Player when I tried playing my resultant .m2ts files for Star Wars? And remember how I said I was probably a codec problem?

It is definitely a codec problem.

I confirmed this because if I try to play any of my old .m2ts files that I had previously created in Windows Media Player, they are producing the same buzzing noise.

The problem is, I'm not sure what caused the problem. I had been installing and uninstalling a number of products over the previous days in an attempt to get through my Star Wars conversion issue. I'm sure installing and/or uninstalling one of these various products caused the problem. However, I don't know which one.

*sigh*

Anyway, when I get home later today I will try downloading and installing the "Media Player Codec Pack" off cnet.com in the hopes that it will fix the problem. If it doesn't, I'll go find some other pack and see if it does the trick.

I'll report back on how it goes.

On a lighter note, I continued with my Lost Season 6 conversion. Used AnyDVD  HD to copy disk 4 and AnyDVD HD unexpected said it needed to grab an update to work with disk 4. Odd, since none of the previous three disks in season 6 needed it. But, I let it do its thing and all seems to be working well.

Wednesday, September 8, 2010

Lost Season 6

Now that I've finished being distracted by thost annoying Star Wars DVD's, I'm back to my normal agenda. So today's effort will be the converting of Disk 3 of Lost Season 6 on BluRay.

The process is pretty straightforward using RipBot264 (with AnyDVD HD in the background of course). I'll post up a set of instructions about this shortly. The only part that makes different than a normal BluRay is that you need to get all the episodes.

The more interesting aspect of getting Lost (or any other episodic show) converted, is how to put them in your Media Center in a usable and 'good' manner.

I use a Windows Media Center and a plugin called MyMovies. I cannot say enough good things about MyMovies, its interface is nice and it makes it MUCH easier to get movies, or sets of movies, to play through your Media Center and extender. It will even do some transcoding for you. PLUS its base functionality is FREE and you an unlock additional (or needed) functionality with a little time and effort (or pay if you want) I'll have to devote a future blog post just to extolling its virtues.

But for now, I will pick on ONE thing I don't think MyMovies does so well.. Episodic TV shows. To be fair, MyMovies was probably not designed with this scenario in mind. Collection management seems to have been its original primary focus.

MyMovies will let you do a couple of cool things to help. You can choose to create a "Box Set" of movies and have a menu to dive in to show the individual movies inside it. For example, you could have one top level "Star Wars" menu item, and all 6 movies underneath it.

And under an individual movie, you can have multiple 'disks', each of which plays something different. The original intention of this, I believe, was to allow for some individual movies with multiple disks of content, to be represented.

I kind of abused this system to make it work the way I wanted it to work.

I don't really play 'disks'. I play my backup files of the movies(WMV or M2TS files), and I use the multiple 'disks' to enable me to watch the individual pieces of content off the disk that I have made backups of. For example, for Pixar movies, I might have one "disk" be the main movie and another "disk" be any of the shorts that came with it. You can label these "disks" however you want, so its good for being able to find and watch what you want.

But back to Lost..

Originally, I had one top level "Box Set" menu entry point for each season, which expanded to each of the individual "disks" as the "movies" in the box set. And then each "Movie" would have disks for each of the episodes on that disk. This sounds fine, but the problem is I wind up cluttering my top level menu. In this case, I have 6 top level menu items for Lost, one for each season.

I don't like that.

I want -one- top level entry point for Lost. All of it.
Unfortunatly, MyMovies doesn't allow me to nest an additional layer in their structure. So, I've settled on one top level "Box Set" for all the seasons of lost. One "Movie" for each season. And each episode in the season as a "disk". The good part of this is it works great through my extender which cannot just play a backed-up DVD directly from the server. The bad part is, the long 13+ item menu for selecting the episode I want to watch which I need to scroll through.

Anyway, if someone has a better way of managing this, I'd love to hear about it.

Tuesday, September 7, 2010

Star Wars VI and other details

So last night, I re-did my Star Wars 6 DVD backup as I was writing up my first example post. It occured to me that I could save other some hassle time by saving the SRT files that I create and make them available. This way, people could skip having to use SubRip if they wanted ot rip the same movie title I have in the same way.

So, I've made a new 'Recent SRT' where I'll put any SRT's I use from DVD's. SRT's are easily extracted from Blu-Rays, so I won't put those there unless there is something special I do with them.

Enjoy

Monday, September 6, 2010

Victory over Star Wars IV! ... mostly

I'm going to declare victory, although I'm still not as happy as I could be.

That said, I managed to backup a copy of Star Wars IV into a AVC-HD, with burned in 'forced' english subtitles.

The good news is that it plays right through my Windows Media Center and my Media Center extender (XBox 360). It even plays right through a program called Media Player Classic (highly reccomended player, btw). I get my 5.1 sounds, and everything is great! Since this is why I am burning my movies into my harddrive, this is more than good enough.

But...

The bad news is that when I play it through Windows Media Player, the sound is not there. It just plays this static/noise.  Its very odd, I've never had that result burning from RipBot264 before. The audio demuxed eventually to a AC3 at 440 htz, but compressing it or copying it resulted in the same problem. The only noticably different thing in the mix here is I used DVD Converter to get a copy without the superfluous other 'angles'. I'm going to chalk it up to a codec problem unless someone tells me otherwise.

On a related note, I've added another software tool into my kit. SubRip. It is good for getting the subtitles off DVD's.

Oh well, its still perfectly suitable for my uses, so I'm moving on. Finally! I'll post a complete set of instructions and what I did to achieve this on an 'Example' page.

Sunday, September 5, 2010

Where to begin

Perhaps not optimally, I am starting to write about this adventure starting in the middle. At some point, I will go into what kind of receiver, speakers, computer, software, etc.. that I am using. But not now.

Right NOW I am focused on getting a functional rip of my "Star Wars IV - A New Hope" DVD! This has been a massive pain in the ass.

Now I've ripped Blu-Rays, and DVD's with subtitles before. I figured I had the basics of how to get everything working down. But this one has been nothing but trouble.

I guess it would be helpful if I listed the software I normally use.
  • WinX DVD Ripper Platinum - This is great piece of software for ripping -most- DVD's without subtitles. I use it to rip DVD's into WMV files since I am only intending to use it on my Media Center. It will preserve the 5.1 audio, and that is important. Unfortunatly, if subtitles are involved, it screws it up by placing them in a position for a non-HD 4:3 perspective screen, and so too low on my TV.
  • RipBot264 - And all its associated supporting software. Excellent software for ripping Blu-Rays! Mediocre software for ripping DVD's, BUT I can use it to get the burned in subtitles if I absolutely have to. The best part is it is free.
  • AnyDVD HD - I have a lifetime subscription to this software, and it is absolutly worth the money. This is the software that lets me get through all the encryption and copy protection on the Blu-Rays and DVD's. Absolutly worth the money, and these guys deserve to be paid for this quality software.
  • DVD Decrypter - The newest tool in my arsenal. And may just be my saving grace with this Star Wars problem. It seems it will let me filter out the extra 'angles' the DVD uses.
Anyway, I'll do another post soon with regards to my adventures with this DVD to date, and if my latest effort worked.