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)
Wednesday, September 15, 2010
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.
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.
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!
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.
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.
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
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
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