Hi,
I created a DVD today from an AVI and set the chapters where appropriate.  It all turned out nicely except that when you jump to the chapters where I set them, the video starts about 1 second too late.
I'm looking for an easy way to adjust the position of the three chapters.  I don't want to alter the layout of the DVD, I don't want to add or delete chapters, I just want to move them.  For example, I want to change the chapter at 11:26 to 11:25, and so on.
I looked around and found a couple of people mentioning reauthoring with some apps, but I don't want to reauthor, and I especially don't want to touch the video (both to avoid messing with the quality, and to avoid wasting several more hours of time.)
I checked IfoEdit but could not figure out a way to do this.
What's the easiest way to do that?

Thanks a lot.

Hi Synetech... What did you originally use to create the DVD and set the chapter points?

(in reply to Synetech)

I converted an AVI with ConvertXtoDVD.

I've done it over and over again several times now trying to get the chapter points just right but it never works out quite right; there's three chapters and one of them is always a little off.


I don't want to reauthor the thing, that is, I don't want to wait 1.5 hours while it reprocesses the whole video (and messes with the VOBs).
I'm looking for a way to for example open FOOBAR (I can't imagine why FOOBAR can't be IfoEdit), load its VTS_01_0.IFO, then double click the chapter position and change it from "11:26.0000" to "11:25.0500:" (ideally, although I'm will to settle for 1-second resolution: 11:26->11:25), click OK, save to update the IFO file only, then be done.

I don't understand why this would be so difficult to do since, from what I can find, the chapter information is stored entirely within the IFO.  Why can't I just edit the IFO?  All that's required is to change a few fields; a chapter time, a few sectors—no big deal right?

(in reply to SithTracy)

I don't use ConvertXtoDVD, but just googled it for stuttering problems with it and it looks like you are not alone.  What version of the software do you have.  It looks like they released an update a week or so ago.

(in reply to Synetech)

Stuttering?

I don't believe I'm having a problem with stuttering, it's just that I didn't set the chapter point right and I don't want to reauthor the whole thing just to adjust the chapter position.

Either way, I've given up on an easy solution for now because I need to get this done by tomorrow.
I've demultiplexed the DVD and am going to use IfoEdit to multiplex it with the new chapter settings.  The problem is that I don't know how to calculate the celltimes—the numbers that IfoEdit expects to indicate chapter points.

Any ideas?

(in reply to SithTracy)

Sorry... can someone else help Synetech?

(in reply to Synetech)

Hey, thanks for the help but I got it sorted out.

What I ended up doing was to use the celltimes file that PgcDemux made from the DVD that ConvertXtoDVD created.  That gave me VOBs/IFOs more or less identical to the ones I had before demuxing.

I then opened the newly authored DVD in DVDShrink and used its chapter cutting dialog to find the timecodes of the chapters as they were and where I want them—thanks to the previewer.  Then I calculated the difference as number of frames and simply added them to celltimes.txt.

I used IfoEdit again to author the DVD again and bam! I had what I needed and was able to do the rest.

It took longer than I had hoped (about six days!) and it was much harder than I expected, but on the other hand, I learned quite a bit in the process, so I guess it was worth it. 

(in reply to SithTracy)

Glad to hear it... sorry I didn't offer much to the problem.  Just never used ConvertXtoDVD.

(in reply to Synetech)

No problem.  Sometimes learning the hard way is more effective. 

(in reply to SithTracy)