The purpose of this tool is to assist contributors in collecting metadata about a DVD or BD. The metadata is collected by the tool by directly reading from the disc. It primarily consists of exact title, video and audio track information, aspect ratio, running time, subtitles, disc label, various features, and in some cases genre and limited cast and crew information.
The methods employed to collect the metadata include (1) reading from industry standard structures created during the DVD/BD build process, (2) intelligent deductions made from scanning the various files and folders on the disc, and (3) manually added information that can be best entered by a human, such as the UPC and Locality of the DVD.
This version of the tool (Version 2.0 and beyond) has been compiled to run in as a plugin withing DVD Profiler. When running as a plugin, the tool will quickly create a skeleton profile within DVD Profiler, which serves as the basis for further editing and ultimately a contibution to the Online Database.
Other useful features of the tool include:
- automatic determination of discID (except for BD in standalone mode - not possible)
- automatic determination of the most likely main title
- manual override of main title selection
- automatic summing of run times of selected titles
- video preview of the movie with the ability to jump to titles and chaoters
- ability to measure the exact aspect ratio of the video using a rubber-banding technique
- ability to save an XML version of the created profile tenplate
- ability to capture and save scene snapshots for later addition to the DVDP ScenePhotos folder
Package Includes:
Plugin Installer - DVDPcaInstallV2.10.zip
Mapping Document - DVDPca Mapping.pdf
Other files are required to be in the same folder as the standalone.
This tool was proposed and discussed in some detail in the Contributions Forum, in this thread. Now that the plugin is available, we should continue to discuss here in the Plugins Forum.
Usage Notes - Brief Step by Step Guide
- Insert a disc and click "Run IFO Scan V2". (The V1 scan is an older version that will soon be removed from the tool).
- Confirm that the main title has been correctly selected and adjust as necessary. Recompute running time.
- Manually add the UPC and Locality.
- Manually adjust any other fields as necesssary, based on your own verification of the data.
- If running in plugin mode, click DVD Profiler create profile and continue to edit the profile in DVDP, add cover scans, etc. and contribute when appropriate.
Usage Notes - Editing existing profiles when running in plugin mode
- When DVDPca is first loaded, the UPC and Locality of the currently displayed DVD are loaded into the manual entry boxes. That means you can run Edit Profile immediately after a scan, and manually update any desired metadata gleaned from the scan. The scanned running time has been loaded into the Clipboard.
Usage Notes - Editing Box Set profiles when running in plugin mode
- To aid in making updates to a box set, the DVDPca "DVD Profiler" menu automatically changes "Edit Profile" to a dropdown menu that includes the Parent and all Child profiles in the box set. So it is possible to perform a cycle of: Scan Child disc, Edit Profile - Child, Scan another Child disc, Edit Profile - Child, etc.
This is possible because the parent profile ID remains in the manual entry fields across all the scans, in order to keep the dropdown working until you are done.
Usage Notes - DVD Metadata
- I have yet to see an actual "Side B" encoded. Has anyone else?
Usage Notes - Blu-Ray Metadata
- Audio track / subtitle data should be very accurate due to BD encoding standards
- Movie data (such as Cast, Crew, Genre, MPAA Rating, etc.) is generally not encoded on the BD disc
- Blu-Ray discID is available only in Plugin mode, and is Invelos proprietary.
- As far as I can tell, there is no "Side" information encoded on a Blu-Ray disc.
Usage Notes - Aspect Ratio
After the movie starts playing, put the movie in "pause" and then you can stretch a "rubber band" between opposite corners of the movie. The aspect ratio dropdown will "snap" to the closest match when the mouse is lifted. For the WMP player, this also works in fullscreen mode, and is thereby more accurate.
Usage Notes - Scene Capture
While the movie is paused at the desired frame, click the Scene Photo button. The movie will jump into fullscreen mode. Then you must manually execute a "Print Screen" operation (modern PCs have a way to do it that does not send a key code to the application). Once DVDPca notices something in the clipboard, you will be presented with a dialogue for saving the screen capture as either .bmp, .jpg, or .png.
Usage Notes - Running Time
- For DVDs, DVDPca takes the longest running time as the first guess for running time.
- For BDs, DVDPca takes running time of the playlist found in the largest .m2ts file in the Stream folder.
- In either case, you can override this choice by selecting the checkboxes for your desired set of main title content. Then you can click "Compute Running Time" and the times will be added for you automatically. The metadata regarding tracks and subtitles is also updated to reflect the metadata scanned from the selected DVD titles / BD playlists.
Usage Notes - Players
The players have been added as a handy frill, but there are a number of limitations. For example, the .NET player will not handle a BD .m2ts file - that's why you can't use the .NET player in BD mode. Even the WMP player will have varying success with BD content, based on your system configuration, installed codecs, etc. The worst that has happened to me on this was the need to end the DVDPca process using Task Manager. I would recommend trying the standalone version first, because the plugin code is identical. If the standalone works, then you will be less likely to cause DVD Profiler to hang when using the plugin.
