DVD-Logic Software, a company which offers a variety of Blu-ray authoring products, has decided to make a selection of their tools available for free.
DVD-Logic's primary business has been selling helper applications for use with the extremely high end Rovio Scenarist or more reasonably priced NetBlender DoStudio. In fact DoStudio Authoring EX Edition includes DVD-Logic's IGEditor for creating menus.
You probably aren't planning to spend $3,0000 or more for DoStudio, and certainly not tens of thousands of dollars for Scenarist. However, you may be interested in DVD-Logic's own authoring software suites which are aimed more at the prosumer and hobbyist market.
Today their DVD Demuxer and HD DVD Demuxer tools became free. These programs do exactly what their names suggest. They extract every stream from every VOB file on a disc.
Each titleset (VTS_XX) is placed in a separate folder, and the saved streams use a naming convention which includes a lot of advanced information about how the original disc authored. Subpictures, including both regular subtitles and menu buttons, are saved in Scenarist's SST format, which can also be used with DVD-Logic's authoring software.
If you don't need the individual assets, and are simply trying to convert from DVD to Blu-ray format, their tool for automating the process, called DVD2BD Express, is also now free. DVD2BD does not do any re-encoding since the Blu-ray spec supports all DVD-Video compliant streams, with only subtitles needing some (lossless) conversion.
Another tool which is now free is their HD File Splitter. This tool allows you to split elementary video and audio streams into shorter files without first muxing (combining) them. This is useful for Blu-ray authoring since elementary streams are required by most commercial authoring tools and muxing them ahead of time may cause problems.
A tool for splitting DVD files is also listed in their announcement, but the link points to a trial version of the software. This appears to be just an oversight, but I am waiting for a definitive answer from the company.
Update: Valery Koval of DVD-Logic gave me a link to the free version of DVD Audio Splitter (listed as DVD Files Splitter in their announcement). Until their website is updated you can use this link.
The last two tools are designed specifically for Scenarist users. DVD Re-author Lite is another program which uses their DVD demuxing engine, and creates a Scenarist project script from the resulting assets. Script Merger for Sonic Scenarist can be used to join multiple Scenarist projects into one.
Besides these tools, DVD-Logic already offered a free BDMV (Blu-ray) authoring program called EasyBD Lite and Subtiitles Creator for converting subtitles from SRT to SST format.
We already have a basic guide for using EasyBD Lite. Although the example in the guide uses standard definition files, the instructions are also applicable to HD video. In the coming months we will be adding more guides for using DVD-Logic tools, including their commercial BDMV authoring offerings.
You can find all the DVD-Logic software on their website. With their significant emphasis on the hobbyist market over the last year, DVD-Logic has quietly become one of the most interesting Blu-ray software developers around.
You probably aren't planning to spend $3,0000 or more for DoStudio, and certainly not tens of thousands of dollars for Scenarist. However, you may be interested in DVD-Logic's own authoring software suites which are aimed more at the prosumer and hobbyist market.
Today their DVD Demuxer and HD DVD Demuxer tools became free. These programs do exactly what their names suggest. They extract every stream from every VOB file on a disc.
Each titleset (VTS_XX) is placed in a separate folder, and the saved streams use a naming convention which includes a lot of advanced information about how the original disc authored. Subpictures, including both regular subtitles and menu buttons, are saved in Scenarist's SST format, which can also be used with DVD-Logic's authoring software.
If you don't need the individual assets, and are simply trying to convert from DVD to Blu-ray format, their tool for automating the process, called DVD2BD Express, is also now free. DVD2BD does not do any re-encoding since the Blu-ray spec supports all DVD-Video compliant streams, with only subtitles needing some (lossless) conversion.
Another tool which is now free is their HD File Splitter. This tool allows you to split elementary video and audio streams into shorter files without first muxing (combining) them. This is useful for Blu-ray authoring since elementary streams are required by most commercial authoring tools and muxing them ahead of time may cause problems.
A tool for splitting DVD files is also listed in their announcement, but the link points to a trial version of the software. This appears to be just an oversight, but I am waiting for a definitive answer from the company.
Update: Valery Koval of DVD-Logic gave me a link to the free version of DVD Audio Splitter (listed as DVD Files Splitter in their announcement). Until their website is updated you can use this link.
The last two tools are designed specifically for Scenarist users. DVD Re-author Lite is another program which uses their DVD demuxing engine, and creates a Scenarist project script from the resulting assets. Script Merger for Sonic Scenarist can be used to join multiple Scenarist projects into one.
Besides these tools, DVD-Logic already offered a free BDMV (Blu-ray) authoring program called EasyBD Lite and Subtiitles Creator for converting subtitles from SRT to SST format.
We already have a basic guide for using EasyBD Lite. Although the example in the guide uses standard definition files, the instructions are also applicable to HD video. In the coming months we will be adding more guides for using DVD-Logic tools, including their commercial BDMV authoring offerings.
You can find all the DVD-Logic software on their website. With their significant emphasis on the hobbyist market over the last year, DVD-Logic has quietly become one of the most interesting Blu-ray software developers around.
