Conquering multiangles and seamless branching

To present you with a good idea of how things work I have chosen my favorite movie again: The Matrix. It's multiangle makes it very well suited to illustrate vstrip's capabilities. In all these examples f: is the DVD-ROM drive. 

You have to authenticate the DVD drive before you can use vstrip. To do that simply run a software DVD player. There's currently no GUI for the latest vstrip, therefore you'll have to enter all these command lines ("....") in a command prompt (start - run - command (W9x/ME), start - run - cmd (W2K/NT)). 

The Matrix contains the main movie in the files vts_02_1.vob - vts_02_6.vob. To get a list of all the program chains (PGC) type "vstrip f:\video_ts\vts_02_1.vob -if:\video_ts\vts_02_0.ifo" . This will get you something like this:

Parsing "f:\video_ts\vts_02_0.ifo"...
0. Length: 02:22:19:201 in 106 cell(s).
1. Length: 00:00:18:193 in 1 cell(s).
2. Length: 00:00:50:193 in 1 cell(s).
3. Length: 00:00:00:213 in 1 cell(s).
4. Length: 00:00:00:213 in 1 cell(s).
5. Length: 02:22:19:201 in 106 cell(s).
6. Length: 00:00:50:213 in 3 cell(s).
7. Length: 00:02:68:225 in 3 cell(s).
8. Length: 00:01:16:213 in 1 cell(s).
9. Length: 00:01:01:213 in 1 cell(s).
10. Length: 00:03:50:229 in 2 cell(s).
11. Length: 00:01:19:213 in 1 cell(s).
12. Length: 02:22:19:201 in 106 cell(s).
13. Length: 02:22:19:201 in 106 cell(s).
14. Length: 02:22:19:201 in 106 cell(s).
15. Length: 00:00:00:213 in 1 cell(s).
16. Length: 00:00:00:213 in 1 cell(s).
17. Length: 00:00:00:213 in 1 cell(s).

After that the program will start searching for keys and then parse the whole VOB file for Cell and VOB ids. You can abort the program by pressing Control-C. Those we have used FlaskMpeg's Open DVD mode will know this list already.. it's the same as in FlaskMpeg. When you play back the DVD in the "follow the white rabbit" mode you'll notice that the player will play Title 6. If you play the movie in the normal mode the title will be number 1, therefore PGC 0 is the stream you'll want to take. In this case it doesn't really matter but in other cases it does matter. 

After having found out which PGC to take you'll have to create a streamlist for the whole movie including full pathnames if you want to rip directly from the DVD drive. Then launch the rip as follows: "vstrip @streamlist.txt -if:\video_ts\vts_02_0.ifo -p0 -$1024 -omatrix.vob". This will rip the movie without the multiangle scenes to a file called matrix.vob in the local directory and split the files at 1GB. The files will be named matrix.vob, matrix_1.vob, etc. @ specifies that the input file is a streamlist rather than a VOB file, -i indicated the ifo file to parse, -p indicates which PGC to use, -$ indicates at which position to split and -o indicates who the files will be called on your harddisk. 

Sample streamlist.. this time assuming that d: is the DVD drive.

Currently there's no GUI for this operation and therefore it has to be run from the command line. However the ifo parsing seems to be able to deal with any kind of movies.. I tested it with multiangles, Purpleman reportat that seamless branching movies work as well and therefore I think it's safe to assume that it will work with multilanguage movies from Disney and others as well.

This method will work with any OS.. there's no limits to this.

However.. if you prepare the files like that you'll be unable to use FlaskMpeg's IFO (Open DVD) mode and you'll have no subs at least for the moment. The problem can be solved by using DVD2AVI to frameserve to VirtualDub and add the subtitles using ssa during compression.