Thanks to everybody in the forums for their help, to 2COOL
for his guides that inspired this one, and r0lZ for coding
PgcEdit!
If you're having problems with this guide, post here and
you'll get some help!
Other PgcEdit guides...
_______________________________________________________ IMPORTANT: If you're on a windows PC,
you'll be better off with the newer, better version of PgcEdit (version
0.4.3.1) which offers video-previewing
and is able to display menus.
The corresponding guide is here.
Goal: Most commercial DVD begin playback
with
some annoying stuff:
FBI warnings, previews, studio logos etc, and in some cases, it can
take
up to a minute to get to the main menu (and in some very annoying
cases,
you can't even skip all this with the remote because of PUOs
(prohibited
user operations) in the VOB files!). This guide will show you how to
skip
all this stuff and rapidly get to the first menu. It will also show you
how to skip stuff that's after the menu, but before the movie
playback
(for example the THX bit, or more studio stuff).
Note 1:In this guide,
we
just skipplayback, but we do
not actually remove the skipped material from the DVD. As a
result,
there is no gain
in space. Note 2:If you want to bypass a menu
(for example a language menu), this guide is not for you! Check out
2COOL's guide
for that, or my guide for
jumping straight to the main menu or the movie. Basic Idea: PgcEdit has a great
function called "Trace". This
allows you to step through the commands and the videos in your DVD
pretty
much the way a settop DVD player would, while watching everything
that's
going on (except the actual video, and that's too bad). If you're
familiar
with programming, this is the equivalent of putting a breakpoint at the
start of your program, and single-stepping through each instruction,
enabling/disabling
breakpoints etc.
We're going to use this function to play your DVD from
the start, and "kill playback" on any program we don't want, until we
hit
the main menu. We can also kill playback on annoying stuff that comes
after
the main menu and before the movie!
Step 0: Play your DVD in your favorite player
This will give you a chance to see what gets played before you get to
the
main menu of your DVD, and also to see what the main menu looks like.
Make
a quick drawing of the buttons placement and what they do when you get
to the main menu, this will be useful later on.
Step 1: Open your DVD in PgcEdit
Simply click File/Open DVD, select your DVD folder, and click OK. Then
enable the Trace Mode in the Trace
menu.
This will enable the Trace display at the bottom of the window.
More
info:
If
you're
not familiar with PgcEdit, what you see on the left is the list of PGC
(Program Chains), and on the right the pre, post and cell commands for
the selected PGC. Click HERE if you need to learn about PGC,
pre-commands,
post-commands and cell commands.
Step 2: Start the trace!
Click on the "up arrow" button ,
this will reset the "virtual" DVD player in PgcEdit. It is the
equivalent
of opening and closing the tray in a standalone player.
Now click the "Next PB" (next playback) button .
This will start the virtual player running (you will see the cursor
highlight
successive PGCs, jumping from place to place according to the PGC
commands).
These PGCs are PGCs with empty cells (video) associated with them.
Soon the player will stop running, because it encountered a PGC
with
some video in it. The display will look something like this:
On the left, the current PGC is highlighted:
You can see that the video
material has no buttons (0b.).
This is important: the fact that the PGC's cell(s) has no button means
we can skip the video without messing things up. If the PGC
indicates
buttons, we can't kill it, we're done: go to Step 4
below.
Again, if you want to bypass a menu that has buttons, see the note above.
More
info:
You can see that the program
stopped at PGC 11 of the language unit
1 (LU 1), in the video manager (VMGM). You can also see that the video
material played back is 3 seconds long (0:03), and has no buttons
(0b.).
If you want to know
more
about this PGC, you can right-click on it, and a window will popup with
lots of info (how many cells, how many programs etc)
Step 3: Skip the PGC!
- Now let's kill playback on that PGC! Simply click the "Kill Playback"
button in the tool
bar.
A message will popup:
This offers to not only bypass the playback of the cell(s) in the
PGC,
but also mark the PGC as having no cells/programs. Simply
click
No for now.
You'd click "yes" if you wanted to
process your files with IfoEdit to do a VOB ID strip: If the cells are
no longer
referenced, the ID for
the cells will be automatically deselected in IfoEdit's GUI and you
don't have to
remember which VOB ID you need to strip.
The display will show:
I've circled in red the area that changed. As you can see, the
post-command has been copied and put at the bottom of the pre-commands.
More
info:
Pre-commands get executed before the video in the PGC cell(s)
is played back, while post-commands get executed after the
video
is played back. Post-commands normally jump (or link) to some
other
place
in the DVD so playback can continue after the video has played. In the
example above, the post-command "LinkPGCN" links to the second PGC in
the
same "domain" (here the VMGM, or video manager menu). So the normal
sequence
is
1) play the video in the PGC, then
2) jump to PGC #2
But "Kill Playback"
copied the post-command as a pre-command, so the program links to PGC
#2 before
playing the video which has in effect been skipped! We can think 2COOL
for this clever trick (and r0lZ for the corresponding macro in
PgcEdit!).
Things get a bit more complicated when certain pre-commands are
present (such as break).
You can read about such cases in 2COOL's guide.
- Now we can hit the "Next PB" button
again, which will get us to the next non-empty PGC, and repeat Step 3
above if there are no buttons, killing each PGC we encounter on
the way!
Eventually, we'll get to a PGC that does
have buttons, the first menu you'd see in a DVD player, unless the DVD
was setup to play the movie right away.
We can proceed to Step 4below.
Step 4: We get to the main menu
In the example above, after killing 4 PGCs, I get to the following
place:
There are 5 buttons here so I don't
want to kill this PGC.
More
info:
As you can see, I'm in VTSM 1 (Video TitleSet Menu 1), Language Unit
1 (LU 1) PGC 1. You can also see that this is also the "Root Menu", the
menu you would go to if you pressed the menu button on your remote. It
has 5 buttons, and you can also see that it's a "motion menu" because
it
has a duration of 42 seconds (a motion menu is an animated menu, as
opposed
to a still menu). By right clicking on the highlighted PGC, you would
find
out that it has 3 cells, with the middle one having the 5 buttons. The
first cell probably has the "menu intro" (what you see before the
buttons
appear, and the third one has the "menu outro" (what you see after you
press a button).
If you
hit Next Playback again ,
you will get a display of the menu layout (see below).
PgcEdit is not currently able to display the actual images that go with
the
menu.
But the layout is usually enough to recognize the main menu. This menu
should correspond to the quick drawing you made in Step 0 while
playing
the DVD in a soft player.
Well, we're pretty much done!
Step 5: Save the DVD, and try it!
Click on the save icon
and open the DVD in a software player. The player should skip all the
material
we "removed", and quickly go to the menu (it might not be
instantaneous,
you might see a quick sequence of title numbers flash by in the status
area of the player, but it will take far less than a second).
A few notes:
If you screw up, don't panic! Simply click the "restore backup"
icon
and click OK when prompted. This will restore the original DVD and you
can try again!
If you want to skip some of the stuff, but keep some other stuff,
you
can
do it, but since PgcEdit cannot show you the video actually played,
you'll
have to make a quick list of the things you see before you get to the
main
menu in Step 0,
including approximate durations and title numbers
shown
by the DVD player (if any). Then in Step 3, you
will have to match the
PGC you stop at with what you wrote in your notes and only kill what
you
really want to kill. That's a bit tedious but I don't know a simpler
way
to do that.
If there's another menu before the main menu (for example, a
language
menu
or an aspect-ratio menu), it will pop up at some point when you click
on the Next PB
button. Don't kill playback on the corresponding PGC because
your
DVD most likely no longer will play normally. Simply click on the menu
button you would normally click on in the menu layout display and click
OK. This will take you to the next video (or the main menu). You can
also skip
that menu but that's a bit involved. see the note above!
If you're having problems with this guide, post here and
you'll get some help!
Optional Step 6: Going further: skipping the stuff after
the menu.
Often times, when you press "Play" on the main menu to play the movie,
you still have to watch more annoying stuff (the THX video, or more
studio
logos) before the movie actually starts. You can use the method above
to
skip these bits too! Here's how:
When you get to Step 4 above
and the menu layout window pops up, click
on the button that corresponds to "Play Movie" (that's where the
drawing
you made during Step
0 comes in handy!), and click OK. Playback will
resume and stop
at PGC of the next video displayed.
If you have more annoying stuff before the actual movie, this
PGC will most likely not be the
movie
itself (unless the stuff you're trying to remove was mastered directly
as part of the movie, which
happens
for studio logos). You can verify that by checking that the PGC
duration
shown on the left is small (a few seconds). Be careful though! Remember
that if you screw up, you can still revert to the original DVD.
In the case I used above, I hit 2 more PGCs before arriving at
the
movie:
The duration of the PGC shows 1:20:45, one hour and 20 minutes. You
can also check that the title number (here "Title 1") matches what you
see in your DVD player when you get to the movie in Step 0.
If you're having problems with this guide, post here and
you'll get some help!
,
this will reset the "virtual" DVD player in PgcEdit. It is the
equivalent
of opening and closing the tray in a standalone player. 
.
This will start the virtual player running (you will see the cursor
highlight
successive PGCs, jumping from place to place according to the PGC
commands).
These PGCs are PGCs with empty cells (video) associated with them.
in the tool
bar.
A message will popup:
and open the DVD in a software player. The player should skip all the
material
we "removed", and quickly go to the menu (it might not be
instantaneous,
you might see a quick sequence of title numbers flash by in the status
area of the player, but it will take far less than a second).
and click OK when prompted. This will restore the original DVD and you
can try again!