SilentBob’s DishRip
Guide
Introduction
This is my guide on how to
successfully rip programs from the Dishplayer
7100/7200 to be placed on DVD/SVCD.
I basically developed this
technique through a
These were my goals (in
priority order) as I was trying to develop this technique:
1. Rip and edit Dish stream without re-encoding. In my
opinion, re-encoding takes too much time and no matter how good your encoder
is, you are ALWAYS losing quality.
2. Use as much freeware/shareware/trialware
as possible. I encourage people to pay for software to
support the efforts of those who spend their time developing quality
software. However, it really sucks to
pay for something only to find out that it won’t do what you are trying to
do….Good luck getting a refund.
3. Use as few tools as possible. The more
tools that get involved, the more confusing the process is, and the greater the
likelihood that stuff won’t “play well” with each other.
Caveats
Software required
DishRip (http://groups.yahoo.com/group/dishrip/) For ripping, duh…
DVDPatcher (http://mitglied.lycos.de/dvdpatcher/) Optional, but helps if you don’t have
EXCESSIVE free hard drive space
BeSweet (http://dspguru.doom9.org/) For fixing the MP2
streams.
BeSweetGUI (http://www.digital-digest.com/dvd/downloads/besweet_gui.html) Not required, but easier to figure out than the
BeSweet command line.
MPEG2VCR
(http://www.womble.com/exe/MPEG2VCR.EXE) This one you have to
pay for, but if you e-mail them you can get a time-limited trial license. It
will be used for repairing the video stream, muxing,
editing, and demuxing.
IFOEdit (http://www.ifoedit.com) This will be used for
creating a DVD Image to burn.
Nero Burning ROM (http://www.ahead.de) For burning your
DVD/SVCD. There are other programs out
there that you can use, some of them are free.
But in my opinion, Nero is the easiest, it will handle both the DVD and
the SVCD, and most people already have it since it is supplied as OEM software
with a
The Steps (screenshots to be added at a later point)
1. Rip the program from your
DishPlayer hard drive. I’m not going to hold your hand through this
step. If you need help, check out one of
the other guides, or read the posts in the DishRip
Yahoo Group.
2. Open DVD Patcher,
and open the MPG movie file. Read what
the current “size” of the movie is (usually 640 x 480 or 544 x 480) and make
sure you set the size so that it is the same.
Then change the bitrate to 3.5MBit. Make sure “Patch” is set to “first header
only”, then press “Patch Now”. The reason for doing this is that all streams
recorded off the Dish report that their bitrate is
15MBit, this isn’t that big of a problem, but MPEG2VCR gets confused by the
large bitrate when it is estimating the resulting
file size. If you do not patch the bitrate, MPEG2VCR will think that the output file size is
going to be huge (15-20GBs) when it is only going to be 1-3GB. If you do not have at least 20GBs free,
MPEG2VCR will complain that there is not enough free space. If you have tons of space free, you can skip
this step.
3. Get BeSweet
and the GUI unzipped and the initial setup completed. See the readme.txt included with the package
if you need help. Select MP2 from the
dropdown on the right side. Then select
your MP2 file as the source file, and select a location and filename for your
destination file. (I usually just add a “‑fixed” to the end of the
original file name. The only box on the
screen that should be checked is the “Use MPA Decoder box”. If you already know you are burning an SVCD,
you can downsample to 44.1KHz
at this point. Now press the MP2 to MP2
button. This will re-encode the MP2
stream. There is a good possibility that
you will see an “invalid stream” error during this process. That is not bad. That is why we are doing this step. The audio stream sometimes gets damaged
during the recording, by re-encoding, we are fixing that to avoid audio sync
problems when muxing.
If someone knows another/better way to repair the MP2 stream without
re-encoding, let me know.
4. Now we turn to MPEG2VCR. There are several steps here, so I will break
them down.
5. First, we are going to
repair the video stream. Go to
Tools>MPEG GOP Fixer. Select your MPG
video stream in the Input field. Click on the “All above” radio button. Now click on the
Output field and select a destination and filename (once again, I usually just
add “-fixed” to the end of my original filename. Press “Scan” and let it run. This will probably take several minutes
depending on your computer speed and program length. When it is done, close the GOP Fixer Window.
6. Go back to Tools>MPEG
Systems Multiplexer. For the video
stream, select the “fixed” version of your MPG file. For the audio stream, select the fixed version
of your MP2 file. Now click on the
AV-Sync button. Open up the text file
that was created when you ripped the program and find what the audio sync was. Make sure and round it to 3 decimal points
and enter that number into the field.
Select a new name and location for your audio/video combined MPG and
press the “Save” button. Once again,
this may take several minutes.
7. When that is done, open
up your muxed MPG.
The video will look grainy, don’t worry, that
is just the way MPG2VCR displays the video, it is still full quality. Now I usually drag the window so that it is
the full size of my screen. That makes
it easier for me to drag the slider to the point I want it. Drag towards the end of your program to some
place where you can see a person talking and check to make sure your
audio/video is in-sync. If it isn’t, I
don’t know what to tell you, all of mine have been. UPDATE: I have found a couple of streams that were not in-sync at
this point. I don’t know if this was due
to a miscalculation on the offset by DishRip, or if
the sync got changed with the video or audio stream was repaired. However, fortunately it appears to have been
uniformly out of sync through the recording.
Therefore by using a slightly painful trial and error process, I was
able to manually figure out a sync delay for these streams that is pretty
accurate. I did this by setting the sync
approximately where I thought it should be, then multiplexing, but only letting
it get about 10% through, then canceling, tell it not to delete the file, open
the file and check the sync, and adjust your values accordingly. Usually after about 4 or 5 tries I can get it
accurate enough that you don’t notice it.
And like I said, it appears to be uniform throughout the recording, so
when I did the whole multiplexing process, the sync was maintained through the
duration. Incidentally, all of the
recordings I had problems with were recorded a few months ago prior to the last
receiver update. I don’t know if that is
just a coincidence or not.
8. You can now edit out the
commercials. The trick here, is that you want to use the mark-in/mark-out to select
the ranges that you DON’T want. Select
the commercial and then press the scissors to cut that segment out. Keep doing that until you have all of the
commercials removed. Then, use the
mark-in/mark-out selectors to select the ENTIRE program that you want saved and
press the save button (it looks like a yellow and purple drum).
9. Now comes the time to
decide if you are going to burn a DVD or SVCD.
If you are burning a DVD, select “MPEG2 program stream”. If you are burning an SVCD, select “MPEG2
Program Stream SVCD” then click on the Audio button and change the sample rate
to 44.1KHz if you did not do that with BeSweet. I have NOT
tried changing the size under the Video button at this point. I don’t know if that would cause it to
re-encode, or if it would squish the video, I have no idea. If you feel like trying, give it a shot and
let me know. Now choose an output
filename and press save.
10. When the file is saved,
I usually like to check it one more time for audio sync. Not that I have had a problem at this point,
nor do I have any suggestions if you do, but I like to make sure. When the save is complete, the video will
usually open. Quite often I have found,
though, that I get no sound when I press play.
Closing all open video windows, and re-opening the cut, fixed MPG seems
to give me the sound back.
11. If everything checks
out, and you are burning an SVCD, you can exit.
Then open up Nero. Close the Nero
Wizard, and select SVCD from the CD Type.
Drag your MPG file over. It will
scan the file and complain that the size (544x480) is NOT SVCD compliant. You can choose to turn off compliance
checking. As I said earlier, this works
in my DVD player, it may not work in ALL players. Nero will then arrange the SVCD layout, burn
it to CD, and you are done.
12. If you are burning a
DVD, you need a couple more steps. You
will need to use MPEG2VCR to Demux the audio back
into two elementary streams. Then open
up IFOEdit, and choose Author DVD. Feed it your video stream and your audio
stream. Choose a destination directory
(typically VIDEO_TS) you MUST create the directory first, IFOEdit
won’t create it for you. It will build
your DVD Files.
13. Once the DVD is built,
use IFOEdit to open the first IFO file in the
directory, and click on GetVTS sectors. This correct the VOB pointer errors, why it
doesn’t build it correctly in the first place, I have no idea. Once that is done, open up Nero, and Select
DVD Video. Drag your IFO and VOB files
into the VIDEO_TS directory on the DVD and burn away. This does NOT give you advanced options like
menu’s chapters etc.
Hopefully this all works for
you. Please let me know if you have suggestions
to make it better.
Final Notes
I have not meant for this
guide to be all-inclusive. I do not
intend on holding your hand and explaining every baby-step that is already
fully documented in other locations.
The DVD authoring is very
basic. You can try using other DVD
Editors. They may work, or they might
complain because your DVD is not standards compliant. If this is the case, you can try “tricking”
them by using DVDPatcher to patch the first frame.
I have to say that I am NOT impressed by Womble’s
Technical support on MPEG2VCR. They
usually ignore my e-mails. I would love
to advise you not to buy their product, however, unfortunately it is the only
product that I have had this much success with.
If you have any questions or
comments, e-mail me at silent.bob at iname.com
Thanks.
Created on
Last Modified on 18 Apr 2003
