Skipping FBI warnings and other 
annoying previews with PgcEdit (version 0.4.3.1 for windows)

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Last updated: 11/29/2004 by Jeanl.

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!

If you're on a Mac, or with Linux, PgcEdit does not have any video or menu previewing. See this version of the guide.

Other PgcEdit guides...
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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 skip playback, 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 (version 0.4.3.0 and above of PgcEdit also lets you preview the video!) 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 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!



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)
In this case, the PGC contains 3 cells, one with a FBI warning, another with a warning and a black final one. We know that's one we can do without, so we can skip it!

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.
 
 
More info:
You'd click "yes" if you wanted to further 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 4 below.
 

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 the preview key "`", you will lauch the previewer, and you can hit Play or move the slider to see exactly what's in there.


 

Here, I get to the main menu, with a first cell that's a short buttonless animated "intro" to the menu, a second cell with the menu buttons, and a third black cell. At this point, I know I need to keep this menu! (If you want to get rid of that menu, or more precisely, have the DVD jump straight to the movie instead of going through that menu, then check out this guide).
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:

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:
  1. When you get to Step 4 above and you get to the menu, you can hit the  button again, which will open the menu.

  2. Click on the button that corresponds to "Play Movie" and click Select. Playback will resume and stop at PGC of the next video displayed.

  3. You can check what's in this next PGC using the previewer (the "`" key). In my example, I get the THX clip, and another studio logo before I get to the movie PGC. I can kill these two PGCs simply by clicking the  icon. The next one I encounter corresponds to Title 1:

The duration of the PGC shows 1:20:45, one hour and 20 minutes. Previewing the PGC confirms that this is indeed the movie, so we can stop right here. Save, and test in a software player. You will see that you'll skip the annoying stuff before and after the main menu! When you click "Play" on the main menu, the movie will start right away.

If you're having problems with this guide, post here and you'll get some help!


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