Difference between revisions of "DVD"

Revision as of 18:21, 24 August 2006

Begin by buying a DVD recorder that does not introduce lag. You will not be able to play very well at all if the image you see on your TV is lagging behind what is actually going on in the game. For a list of known lagless DVD recorders plus some additional tips, please see this thread on the SDA Forum.

Be sure to record on SP or better speed. See your DVD recorder's manual for more info about this. You will wreck the quality of your run if you record on a speed worse than SP.

If you decide to mail your DVD(s) to me for processing, proceed to the submission guidelines for information about how to contact Radix. Otherwise, if you want to try to encode your run yourself, keep reading.

You will need to install a large number of separate pieces of software to get your run off of the DVD and encode it to H.264 / DivX. All of this software only runs on Microsoft Windows, so you will need to have access to a computer running Windows to proceed. Begin by acquiring all of the software as instructed in the Acquiring Codecs section.

DVD software installation

Download dgmpgdec146.zip, the DGMPGDec utilities by Donald Graft and extract the contents to "C:\Program Files\DGMPGDec". This folder contains the DGIndex.exe application and the important DGDecode.dll file. Leave this folder alone for the moment.

Preparing DVD source files for avisynth

Begin by inserting the Finalized DVD into the DVD drive in your computer (if the DVD has not been Finalized in the DVD recorder, it probably won't work). Navigate to your DVD drive and select all of the .VOB or .VRO files from the VIDEO_TS folder on the DVD you inserted. Copy them to a folder where you will do your video processing. For the purposes of this guide the video processing folder will be aptly named "C:\video processing".

Then open DGIndex.exe inside the DGMPGDec directory you unzipped during the software installation. Inside DGIndex.exe, go to File -> Open, or just hit F2. Navigate to your DVD drive and select all of the .VOB (or .M2V) files from the VIDEO_TS folder on the DVD you inserted. Hit OK twice to proceed to the main screen.

From here, simply go to File -> Save Project and save the file with a name you can remember. It shouldn't matter where you save it, but if you save it at the root level of your C: drive and name it vob, it will make later steps easier.

DGIndex will do the work of demuxing your run and, after a time, will finish and beep. From here, you will need to unzip and edit the vob.avs file. Open it in Notepad and change the C:\Program Files\AviSynth 2.5 ... lines to wherever you have your Avisynth plugins directory. If you installed Avisynth on your C: drive, these lines are probably already correct, and do not need to be changed.

Next, change the C:\vob.d2v to wherever you saved the DGIndex project file. You should not need to change this, either, if you followed my instructions earlier and saved the project file at the root level of your C: drive and called it vob.

Finally, check to see whether you have a .mpa or .ac3 audio file in the same directory where you saved the vob.d2v file. If you have a .ac3 file, rename it vob.ac3, and then change the C:\vob.ac3 in vob.avs to wherever the file is located on your system.

If you have a .mpa file, uncomment (remove the #) before the fourth line in the file and change the c:\vob.mpa to wherever the file is located on your system. Don't forget to comment (add a # before) the fifth line in the file if you had a .mpa file instead of a .ac3 file.

Save and close the vob.avs file.

Now open VirtualDub.exe in the VirtualDub-1.6.11 folder. A message will appear. Click OK to begin working in VirtualDub. From here, the process is the same as if you were capturing the video yourself. See Getting Started (Editing). (The .avs file referenced there will be the vob.avs file you just made; no further modifications to it should be necessary.)

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