Infinifilm/BoV Guide

Infinifilm/BoV Guide by OxP

I am sure that an Infinifilm title has passed through your hands with the massive amounts of extras on the same disc as the movie. You may have also noticed that they were accessable while watching the movie. This is all very cool, but how can this be reproduced in Scenarist? Now, there are of course other button over video guides, as this is, but they take a different approach to showing you what to do. I have taken the, what I believe to be, easier method of attaining the commands for the buttons, from Vobedit. If you find this too cumbersome, then by all means check out the other BoV guides available out there.

What you will need:

Vobedit
Ifoedit
IFOUpdate
Sonic Scenarist

Preparation

To start off I would like to mention a few things briefly. This guide is based on an Infinifilm title, but its contents also apply to other button over video films. I would also like to note that you should know your way around DoItFast4u, DoCCE4U, and ReAuthorist. They are simple enough to use and only key notes about the programs will be mentioned in the guide. To begin, we open up DoItFast4U and right click on each of the ifos to analyze their structures. Just from looking at VTS_1, the main vts, it is obvious that we need not rip the first pgc as it has less subs than the second. All we need to do is rip the second one. The other vtses, I assume you know how to handle from experience...this is of course a more advanced guide. I sure hope you know your way around Scenarist atleast a bit as otherwise things might be difficult to follow. You can just rip and encode that second pgc and then create an scp via ReAuthorist. It will make a dummy for PGC 1 but we will correct that later.

Making Button Over Video Subpictures Compliant

Load that script created by ReAuthorist into Scenarist and now we begin work. Our first order of business is to make sure that the subtitle streams are compliant for buttons. What does this mean? Well, for a subpicture to contain buttons there are certain requirements which it must follow. Requirements for a subpicture that can contain buttons:

Each subtitle in each stream that is to have buttons, must have a forced start. This is not much of a problem as DoItFast4U and ReAuthorist take care of this for us.
Each subtitle stream must have a subtitle start and end at the same time in the movie. This guarantees that the button exists for the same amount of time no matter which stream is selected. In other words, no matter which substream a person picks while playing the movie, there will be a button. The only difference is that when the time for that button to show up comes around, in some substreams it will not be seen and in others it will be, but in both cases, it IS there.
No subtitle that is going to have a button atop it is allowed to cross a scene boundary.

These three small points will help you a great deal to steer clear of any Scenarist errors having to do with the buttons. I must stress, that you adhere to these guidelines and check all the buttons subpictures in all the substreams for compatability...especially if you use Scenarist 2.7 because I personally had to completely restart when I didnt check the subtitle stream first before making the buttons. What I did was find a stream that contained just the button over video subs and check to see where they started. What you need to do is compare the start time of the large blocks(the actual button over video subs) and the chapter point. You will quite often have to change the start time of the sub so that it does not cross a scene boundary. Likewise, you need to change the start time for all the correspondings subpictures in each of the other streams. Now, there is one little thing to mention. Each button over video sub comes in pairs. One that lasts for 15 frames then the actual button over video subpicture. Now you will need to adjust the time of this 15 frame sub as well. Its not easy to select them as they are so thin in the Track Editor, but I assure you that it can be done. With some practice you will find it quite easy. Now that we have compatible substreams we are almost ready to go.

Finding Button Commands

We now have to find a first button to use as a template for the rest of them. So boot up VobEdit and lets have some fun. Some VobEdit tips:

Write down LBA's just incase you close the program or lose your spot. It makes life ever so much easier.
Expand the right bar so that you can see the cell number along with the vob id number.
Scroll quickly, it takes a while to get to where youre going.
Look at the times on the right side to see how far you are in the cell id. Note that the timestamp is reset for every cell id so this should help you gauge how far to skip forward or backwards.

Now that that is aside, find out in which cell your first button is in and hit the Button checkbox in VobEdit(Typically it is Vob/Cell ID 1/1). Locate the first navigation packet of that vob/cell id. Look at the information in the right box. There is quite a bit of it. For one, you find out the color contrasts to use, the button commands, and the exact position of the buttons.

All this information can be reused, so there is no need to look up EVERY single nav packet that has buttons in it, only a few to get the idea of how the commands change. In my example, its every odd number, unless there are two buttons on one subpicture. What is this mysterious number i speak of? Look at the picture, you will see the button command with the following "(set-val)<3>". That 3 is the number about which I speak. This number is what register 9 is set to. From here some more work is done to get to the extra, but there is no need to go into that. I realize that my description of how the patter changes may be confusing, so here is an example. Here is a string of three subpictures with one button in each subpic with the register values inside.

[1][3][5]

Here is this same example with the second subpicture having two buttons.

[1][3,4][5]

I suggest that you check the first two or three cell ids that contain buttons to get the general pattern as well as check out a cell id with two buttons in one subpicture. This is all to establish a good idea of what the pattern is so that the right extra is accessed when the button is pressed. Write down the command as you will need it later.

Button Creation

Now we can go to the simulation editor and create the buttons. In my case there was a duplicate subpicture for every sub picture with buttons, so make sure to create the buttons for the proper one. Click the square button next to the pointer button on the top bar of the editor. Now create the button to cover a good part of the bottom. It does not really matter though, as we will change its size to match the original buttons. If you look at VobEdit, it tells the coordinates of the buttons. This can be inputted into the editor to make the buttons properly. Goto Subpicture and Highlight on the bottom and choose Buttons and select your button. Here you can set the sizes as seen in VobEdit.

Now that we have our first button, we can set the display and action colors. So once again under Subpicture and Highlight choose Colors. You should see something like this only with really weird colors for display and action. In my case the colors were as follows with these contrasts. Color information is also found in Vobedit, but I am not sure how to figure out what colors the numbers represent..this is not really a huge problem, just watch the dvd and pick matching colors. One thing that can be read about the colors though is the transparencies, which is quite useful. As you can see in VobEdit there is a section about the colors. The contrasts are numbered 0-15. These can be divided into percentages as shown by Scenarist. 15 is equivalent to 100% and every step down in Scenarist is one number less. so 87%(2 steps down) is 13 in Vobedit. Once you have those colors set up. Hit the 'Set as Default' button so that each of our subpictures will have these colors from now on so we dont haveto recreate them each time.

Oh yes, one more thing. You will notice the two little green-blue boxes in the button bar of the Simulation Editor. One is wide and one is letterbox. You have to reset the button sizes for each separately. Annoying, I know. Have fun making those buttons. One more thing though, when you have two buttons on one subpicture make sure to go to Tools and hit Autoroute. This allows you to hit up or down on your remote to switch between the buttons.

Now that we are done making the buttons time to set up the commands. Minimize the simulation editor and go to the scenario editor. You should now be looking at the pgc where you made your buttons. Select the first button and go back to the simulation editor. On the bottom portion you should see two arrows in either direction, hit the right one and a new tab will appear, labeled 'Button Commands'. Now we can use that information from Vobedit to make the button commands. In my case the command was as follows:

Set GPreg<9> mov (set-val)<1>(Link subset) LinkTailPGC

Scenarist uses different terms to describe this as you can see from the picture to the right. If you have two buttons, you should set two commands one for each. Repeat this for each subpicture with buttons. After you have finished doing all this we have just a little bit more work to make sure that we have the same number of subpicture streams as the original.

This is not really spoken of too much in terms of Scenarist, but while we're using the program, why not? Open up Ifoedit and open the main movie VTS of your Infinifilm title. There should be two pgcs, one that is played without the Infinifilm feature and one that is played with it. In the top box expand the VTS_PGCITI tree and pick PGC2. If you scroll down a bit you should see something called "Sub-picture stream status". You can now view all three of the subtitle streams. There are two important pieces of information to look out for when viewing the data for each substream, those being the wide and letterbox values. A value of 0 corresponds to 0x20 and a value of 2 corresponds to 0x22. So we now know which subtitle address is used for each stream. We can now set all this information in Scenarist. In the Scenario Editor, select the title in which the PGC exists, for PGC 2, it would be Title 2. If you scroll down in the middle window you can see that there is an attribute labeled "Subpicture Availibitly". Set this to "Custom" if it is already not and check only Subpicture Streams 1 through 3 as our DVD only has 3 for this Title. Now click on the PGC(top portion) just below the Title and double click the box to the right of the box that says "Subpicture Attribute"(lower middle). You shall now see 3 subpicture streams here. Once again double click to the right of "Subpicture Attribute #0" and you shall see Wide and Letterbox. In my case 0 was used for wide for the first stream and 1 was used for letterbox in the first stream. Repeat this for all the PGCs and all of the streams.

After you have compiled your project, there is one more thing worth mentioning in the process, this being the IFOUpdate settings. In the Options drop down make sure that "Copy Color Table for Each PGC" and "Copy Audio and Subpicture Tables" are both checked. Well, after all that work, you can test out your newly reauthered Infinifilm title. A word of warning, I have had problems in Scenarist where it compiled, but the buttons did NOT work. So I must stress that you be very meticulous in the button creation process.