DVDRemaster and its modules

DVDRemaster uses modules to recompress video. The modules accept the raw MPEG2 video data (not VOB) from the standard input and write the recompressed frames to the standard output. Modules can easily be added, as long as they follow these specifications:

• Data must be read from stdin and written to stdout
• Each frame must be smaller than the original
• I, P and B frame order and GOP boundaries must be kept
• Top-field-first and repeat-first field flags must remain the same
• Size and aspect ratio must also remain the same
• VBV delay should be 0xFFFF
• Two-field pictures can be merged into one-frame picture

Modules are given three arguments. The first one is a floating point value specifying the ratio of compression. The second argument is a number from 0 to 3 specifying the quality of the re-encode - 0 being the worst (faster), 3 being the best (slowest). The third is the size of the M2V, the module cannot know otherwise since the data is streamed. For instance the following command would recompress original.m2v, whose size is 1024000 bytes, by a factor of 1.5.

./M2VRequantiser 1.5 0 1024000 < original.m2v > recompressed.m2v

The two modules that come with DVDRemaster are based on libmpeg2 and mpeg2enc and are released under the GNU General Public License.

Download the Source Code for M2VRequantiser

Download the Source Code for M2VDownsizer

DVDRemaster also uses an external process to add meta-data, based on mp4v2 and HandBrake's patches, and is released under the GNU General Public License.

Download the Source Code for AddMetadata