Key Feature Request

I must say I am very impressed with progress on Rebuilder and I am using it now for all my high compression projects with almost 100% success. With a few glitches that still need sorting I think its a great tool. At the risk of sounding too picky though, I really think its time that menu compression was added to the features.

I do think this feature is important because Rebuilder is a high compression option as opposed to Shrink or others which work great for low compression. If like me you like to retain menus for the convenience of Chapter searching, it can be a real pain when you get one of those quot;Mega Menusquot; that seem to be becoming ever more popular, you know the ones with lots of fancy linking vob's resulting in menu sizes of 500MB+ Freeing up 40-50% of these for the main movie can really have a noticeable impact on end quality, especially if you are on high compression (which tends to be the case if you are using Rebuilder).

I don't wish to second guess jdobbs's priorities but I am just making this point now so as to get feedback from other forum members. If there are other more important things to get done please accept this comment as a well intentioned request.

BTW - I do know the trick of running it through Shrink first to compress the menu and have used this on a few occasions. I just think its time that Rebuilder became a quot;completequot; back up tool.

You're right.  That's something I have to get in soon.  Truth is it really isn't that much different than doing any other VOB -- I just didn't want to spend any time on it up to this point.

sorry to hijack the post, but are you still working on compressing the angles as well?  Or has that been shelved in favor of bug fixes, etc..

...but you still working on CC implementation, aren't you?

Sorry to highjack this thread as well but i want to rebuild my mother in law. How soon can you get this feature to work......it's urgent.........she's getting really big

Sorry, i can't help myself....

lol, very nice

love to be able to shrink em from a size 9 to a size 5

The option to compress menu's using DVD Rebuilder would be great.

i think that the angle part is more important than menu, we have numenu4u, and works great with rebuilder.

Came across my first real need for menu compression over the weekend. Backing up Finding Nemo PAL R4 with DVD-RB works fine, but the bitrate of around 2300~2500 is a little bit too low as everytime there is lots of movement on the screen there is very noticable artifacts on the screen. From here I can either strip out the DTS track or compress the 500MB menu, and as I generally look for a 1:1 backup without lossing quality I'd rather try compression the menu.

If you want to really compress menus try MenuShrink in the IFO/VOB editing forum. It's a neat little app that compresses menus into stills with optional audio removal. So that 500MB menu will come in at around 5MB. A great option for when you need every bit, but want to keep full menu functionality.

Plus it's simple to use, fast and completely free.

Of course, NuMenu is great for when you just want to get those gigantic menus down to a reasonable size, and keep all the fancy motion video.

Originally posted by brashquido
I'd rather try compression the menu.

What I generally do in a case like this is to use DVD-Shrink to shrink only the menus, then run DVD-Rebuilder against the result to shrink everything else.

(wmansir's suggestion would save a lot more space, but then you don't have a 1:1 backup.  Using Shrink lets you keep the motion in the menus.)

Wow wmansir, MenuShrink works great !! I think I might finally be able to get this project done now without having to strip out sound tracks or really reduce the space for the extras.

Nemo menu original is 465MB which gives me an overall bitrate of just over 2500 for the movie. This leaves some areas of the movie with very noticable visual artifacts and a heavy halo effect around moving sections of the picture.

Using DVDShrink brought the menu down to about 251MB which gave me an overall bitrate of around 2750 for the movie. Most of the random artifacts seem to have disappeared, but there is still some noticable halo effect around moving images.

Using MenuShrink brought the menu size down to 8.9MB which has given me an overall bitrate of about 3015 for the movie. Still to see the results from this yet as it was still encoding this morning, but I'd expect that a bitrate increase of 500 over the orignal attempt should pretty much remove all artifacts from the movie.The only thing I don't like about MenuShrink is that it is unable to work from a mounted ISO. My general workflow is to rip the movie to ISO until I get time to convert it, and then use Daemon Tools to mount the ISO as a drive. With MenuShrink I then have to rip the ISO again, this time in file mode so that MenuShrink can do its thing.

Originally posted by brashquido

The only thing I don't like about MenuShrink is that it is unable to work from a mounted ISO. My general workflow is to rip the movie to ISO until I get time to convert it, and then use Daemon Tools to mount the ISO as a drive. With MenuShrink I then have to rip the ISO again, this time in file mode so that MenuShrink can do its thing.

Hi brashquido, and thanks for the good feedback on MenuShrink. True, it won't work on mounted ISOs because the silly thing is trying to process quot;in placequot; (and even create a backup directory in the ISO drive!). I'm not sure whether that's completely impossible to do. Is it possible to mount the ISO not as read-only? In that case, is it possible to edit/modify files in the directory (and create the backup)?
If it's possible, then MenuShrink should work. If it's only possible to read from the mounted ISO files, then it won't work. I could possibly add a mode where you don't process in place and you specify an output directory for the processed files. Then you'd be able to work straight from a mounted ISO. But I'm not sure how many people would use that feature...
jeanl