Bam! Heh, heh, a picture is worth a thousand words as they say. Good, that will be a placehlder for me to look into that on the next round.

BTW, anybody getting a feeling yet for what kinds of DVDs or Studios or whatever, gives the best metadata? Any trends?

Quoting Blair:

Quote:
Dolby Surround keeps displaying as 2-Channel Stereo for me.

And will forever do so, because physically it is a two channel sound format. Only in the right hardware is the into those two channels matrixed "rear"-channel retrieved.

cya, Mithi

There is metadata for AC-3 at least that can flag as Dolby Surround. I know it doesn't exist on PCM. I'm not sure about DTS.

Progress for those who care: BDinfo code has been successfully embedded into DVDPca and is working in a rudimentary fashion. I am finding a vast chasm of differences between the Blu-Ray structure and the DVD structure. In addition, there is a lot less movie-related metadata. I cannot find any evidence of things like cast/crew, genre, release date, etc. About the only thing I will be getting is timing and datastream info such as codecs, languages.

The mapping to DVD Profiler will be further constrained by the fact that DVDP supports only a small subset of the Blu-Ray values for certain feilds such as subtitle language - at least according to the BDInfo code. And a few if the codes that DVDP uses, such as "Audio Commentary" are not in the BDInfo tables, so I will have to deduce that value from some other field in the stream data.

Fortunately, BDInfo has code for recognizing a number of special features available on Blu-Ray, based on a scan of the well-defined Blu-Ray file specification. You can tell when certain features are present simply by noting if corresonding files or folders are present - they don't even have to be parsed.

Thanks!
Just installed both standalone and plugin and ran a few DVDs through it.
Everything 

First of all: thank you for your excellent work, mediadogg!

About the "Dolby surround 2.0" versus "Dolby stereo 2.0" problem. Is there any way to differenciate between those two with DVDInfo or DVDPca? The info on cover / info in metadata on disc is very often wrong.

Same question for the many cases where mono 1.0 is displayed as stereo 2.0, but same audio in both channels. The latter one should at least be possible to figure out with your tools, but I don't know how to interpret the technical info.

Quoting superted:

Quote:
About the "Dolby surround 2.0" versus "Dolby stereo 2.0" problem. Is there any way to differenciate between those two with DVDInfo or DVDPca?

Short answer: No.

Long answer: Not with DVDInfo or DVDPca. Surround is defined by a flag inside the Audio stream. The only way to tell the flag condition is to actually access or analyze the track. So far, I'm aware of two reliable tools to get this job done: VLC player (while playing the movie) and DVD Decrypter. Some users rely on "Power DVD", but personally I don't recommend it – in my experience it's not reliable when it comes down to exactly this question.

Quote:
Same question for the many cases where mono 1.0 is displayed as stereo 2.0, but same audio in both channels. The latter one should at least be possible to figure out with your tools, but I don't know how to interpret the technical info.

Sorry, but 1.0 is always Mono, and it's always determined correctly – but it is not that common as one might think. Most tracks are actually "2.0 Mono", and there's no way to automatically determine if a 2-channel-track is actually "2.0 Mono" or "2.0 Stereo". The only way would be to extract those audio tracks and run it through an audio analyzer software, that can tell if both channels are identical (2.0 Mono) or not (2.0 Stereo or 2.0 Surround).

So, if the cover tells you it's "Mono", you'll better believe it. 

Quoting superted:

Quote:
First of all: thank you for your excellent work, mediadogg!

About the "Dolby surround 2.0" versus "Dolby stereo 2.0" problem. Is there any way to differenciate between those two with DVDInfo or DVDPca? The info on cover / info in metadata on disc is very often wrong.

I just checked the code in BDInfo and there is code for doing this for Blu-Rays. FYI, I do not support DVDInfo, not even my version, which was simply a recompile for testing and understanding so I could use the code.

I have added code from both DVDInfo and BDInfo, with grateful acknowledgement, into DVDPca, and that is the only code that I will support going forward.