Rivergate Software Inc. - makers of DVDAfterEdit

You could be correct.

For the VMG Title Search pointers, this number seems totally arbitrary since they don't necessarily correspond to the VTS, and a single VTS can incorporate several titles. Furthermore the field that holds the number of title search pointers is two bytes, yet only 1 through 99 are valid.

A further restriction is in the number of PTTs (chapters). In a sequential PGC title the number of PTTs is restricted to 99. Only in a multi-PGC or random PGC title is the number of PTTs allowed to reach 999. The field itself in the spec is two bytes once again. This definitely would come into play on the LED display of a player.

I suspect the limit also has to do with the naming convention for VTS files. They only allowed for two characters to represent the title number, as in VTS_TT_N.VOB where TT is the title number and is always padded with a leading zero. Except for this, almost everywhere else in the specification seems to have at least 7 bits reserved for the VTS numbers. I hate to speak ill of the specification designers, but even this makes no sense, since the zero padding of the two digit number does not cause directory sorting to be entirely correct on any file system, since the suffix IFO, BUP or VOB affects sorting as well.

I suppose that players which do no validation on the limits of the number of title search pointers could play a disc with more than 99 titles.

In HD standard the limitation has been raised from 99 to 511 Video Title Sets, with a limit of 200 files comprising each VTS. Basically 99 each for menu vobs and title vobs plus the manager data and backup.

The title serach pointer limit is also 511 although as before a VTS can comprise more than one title so it makes about as much sense as before. The limit to the PTTs (number of chapters) in a sequential PGC is 511, and in a multi-PGC or random PGC is is raised to only 1023, which is not much above the 999 from before. Go figure.

Most of the limitations have been lifted, or at least increased greatly in HD Advanced Content. The naming of evob files is totally unrestricted as long as it is within 255 characters. The file names are kept as part of the manager's data. The ADV_OBJ directory can contain up to 511 subdirectories, and the total number of files in the whole directory tree has to be less than 512X2047. I doubt we will see anyone reaching these limitations any time soon. But perhaps some one will try.

I don't have the Blu-ray specification handy, so I won't comment on that but it seems as though most of the arbitrary limits are lifted in Blu-ray as well.

Thanks Trai for your warm compassion. My client is understanding, so it seems I'm not without work in the near future. It still remains to be seen, how much compensation they or I are going to have to pay to the publisher (who misses a trade show because of this), but everybody seems to realise these kind of things can happen.

Thaks to the powerful editing in DvdAE I managed to put together a new version in under 12 hours and the DLTs are all ready for replication. Let's hope they didn't manage to print the whole run from the previous masters yet.

I should have known about the titles limit, but for some reason this information was very hard for me to check from the literature. Maximum amount of titles per disk is often not shown when other limitations are listed.

All this for a pretty airheaded reason. I just wanted to put all the PGCs in different titles so that I could have all the video tracks in one continuous PGCs. Nobody is ever going need to synchronise the disks, I just wanted the player to show the track time to the user regardless of model.

Shaken, but still standing,

-Jouko-Thomas

That's what I was afraid of. I have produced a totally useless disk, which is probably already printed. And my client has missed a crucial deadline by a week. I finally managed to mess up royally with a clear violation of the spec. This is a major client and if I loose him I might loose my business.

With my luck Apple DVD-player and the set top players I use for testing just happily address titles over 99.

DvdAE allows me to create as many titles I like. It also allows me to write jumps to titles over 99 without any warning. "Check All Commands for Errors" doesn't report anything wrong, when I have illegal titles and commands referring them.

Gear mastered my DLTs without reporting anything wrong with the disk.

Eclipse verification by the replicator accepted my disk without reporting any errors even though it breaks the spec in a way that the disc will never work in most players.

Maybe DvdAE should report this as an error. This is not just badly designed navigation, it is an serious error if there ever was one.

The only piece of software, that ever warned me is was Sonic Cineplayer by stating that my disk is invalid. It didn't say how and I didn't trust it, because I never trust it.

Oh my, this makes me humble for a moment,

-Jouko-Thomas

There can be up to 32,767 PGC's in a domain. All titles are PGC's, but not all PGC's are titles. DVD's such as Trivial Pursuit and other games have thousands of PGC's.

Authoring applications such as DVD Studio Pro sometimes introduce artificial limitations because of how they implement things, in particular making things titles when they could just be PGC's.

Indeed, the title limitation is 99, even though the 7 bits allocated for storing title numbers could hold up to 128.

I believe that's right. There can be 99 TTs total across a maximum of 99 VTS. It's up to the author to divvy them up.

I would love to understand - one day - why we wound up with all these 99 limits. Didn't the DVD spec folks ever hear of base-2 - i.e. why aren't the limits numbers like 128 or 256?

Michael