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Old 12th March 2011, 05:19   #1  |  Link
robpdotcom
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Xin1generator: Create Ordered Chapter mkv's from Seamless Branching BluRay's

Hello,

I'd like to introduce a program I've been using for a few months (not my project, just spreading the word). It's called xin1generator, and what it does is this:

If you have a Bluray with multiple editions on one disc (such as Avatar, with the Theatrical, Special Edition, and Director's Cut), it will help you create a single mkv file with all versions of the movie - and allow you to select and play any version, just as you would with the disc. The total file size will usually be slightly larger than the longest version of the movie, and much smaller than ripping each version separately. There's no limit on the number of editions, so you can keep as many as you like.

It uses eac3to to demux the streams, generate a Matroska ordered chapter file, a Matroska tag file, and even generates a file with a list of frames that need to be encoded as I-Frames if re-encoding. Once it has finished demuxing, you use a Matroska muxer (such as MKVMerge or Haali's GDSMux) to create the mkv and add the chapters and tag files.

The author recently created a GUI which makes everything dead-simple:



How To Use

Most of the options/parameters are self-explanatory, but here's a quick rundown of what they do:

Available titles - Lists all the titles on the disc, from longest to shortest (the longer titles will be the different versions of the film)

Selected titles - As you add the titles you want to keep, they will appear here. You can choose the names, which will go into the tag file (Special Edition, Director's Cut, Theatrical Version, etc).

The "Extract tracks" check box will allow you to select only the streams you want - un-check it to extract all streams.

Tracks - If you check the "Extract track" box, here you can select the streams you want eac3to to extract, and in the box to the right of the stream, you can specify the format you want to extract it as - or leave it alone to keep it in it's original format.

The "Preserve Chapters" option - To play correctly, xin1generator must create many chapter marks. Selecting this option hides all chapter marks that do not correspond to the original movie chapters. I highly recommend checking this option.

After extracting all the streams, you can drag/drop them into mmg (MKVmergeGUI). Then, from mmg's Global tab, add the tags.xml and chapters.xml files that xin1generator created. Then, mux as you would any other mkv.

Playback

Haali is the only splitter which currently supports ordered chapters, and no hardware players support them yet either. However, the movie will still be playable with any software/hardware that supports Matroska - it will simply play the first edition, followed by the segments which make up the other editions in the file.

When playing the movie, you can use Haali's tray icon to select which edition you want to watch. Or, in MPC-HC, right click > Filters:



Links

Download the latest xin1generator here:

Direct Link

Project Home Page

Extract the files into your eac3to folder. It includes the GUI, or can be run as a command line tool.

If you have any questions, feel free to ask and I'll help as much as I can.
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Last edited by robpdotcom; 16th October 2011 at 21:56.
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