[Matroska-devel] DVD Menu

[Christian HJ Wiesner]

Guys,

i thought about this recently, and referring to the discussion on IRC 
lately if we should wait with the 1.0 specs until menues are at least 
specified ( even if implemented later ). What you think of the following 
idea :

Lets implement a 'simple' menue system and 'basic' control tracks for 
the 1.0 specs, and lets look at the DVD menues very closely for that. 
After all, they should meanwhile not be protected anymore as the DVD 
system is almost 15 years old now ( not real units, but at least the 
specs ), so i dont think the industry is looking very closely at who is 
implementing it without paying the licenses. Lets not forget, any 
Windows OS is coming with by default with a DShow implementation for the 
DVD menue, maybe we could even use the existing DShow fiter that way ?

A more advanced menue system could follow later then, with the 2.0 
specs, and i even think it wouldnt hurt if this menue system would not 
be based on the 1.0 version, but be a complete starting over from 
scratch. After all, the possibility to mux a complete DVD into a single, 
huge matroska file, then maybe use the splitting feature in mkvmerge to 
split a 8 GB file into two 4 GB files to be able to burn them on 
DVD-R's, without changing anything in the DVD itself. As soon as spyder 
has the MPEG2 video muxing done, only the menues are missing for that, 
as all audio formats ( AC3, DTS, MP2, PCM ) are already supported in MKV.

The biggest argument for DVD users to look at matroska for 
editing/intermediate storage was of course if we were able to make 
VirtualdubMod edit MKV files with MPEG2 video. I am maybe not telling 
you this often enough, but without VdubMod supporting MKV, matroska 
would not be as popular as it is . mkvmerge may be the most important 
tool for MKV creation amongst the Pro's, but the average matroska user 
is still very focussed on VirtualdubMod, and the fact that matroska 
files can be edited cant be weighed in gold. Cyrius, would MPEG2 editing 
in MKV be possible, mayb even with preview ?

What does everbody think of the idea to make a 'simple' menue spec based 
on the DVD specs, for the 1.0 matroska release ?

Best regards

Christian

Steve Lhomme wrote:

> I'm going to spend some time in the near future to check the DVD menu 
> specs (Pamel sent me a paying site where there could be usefull 
> informations).
> I found this tool that may be a good indication on what is possible 
> with DVD menus :
> http://menuedit.dimad.net/home.html
> BTW, we will probably have to do a tool DVD menus to the Matroska menu 
> format. So we will probably have to code the whole parser for DVD 
> menus at some point. Apparently there is no such thing existing as an 
> open source code. But does anyone have info on this ? Maybe on VLC or 
> MPlayer  they have this ? I'm sure we could get more help from the 
> CoreCodec team or Gabest as they probably would benefit from such code 
> too to read DVDs in a better way.