vamps News

This release has some small new features as well as some enhancements and bug fixes. The copy tab now has a timer, which shows the elapsed time for copying. Another text field on the copy tab shows the current size of the copy target directory. And finally there is a new "copy" mode. Instead of feeding the source DVD's cells contents into dvdauthor, the user may decide to dump these MPEG streams to separate files.... read more

There are no groundbreaking new features in this
release. The user may now restore the hardwired
default settings. And the user is now asked to
confirm when leaving the settings page with any
unsaved changes. Finally we have a new icon!

But most important: there is a binary distribution
for Linux x86 now. It includes an installer as
well as an uninstaller. All you have to do is
download and execute the .bin file. Please note
that the file may not be easily launched from
within a graphical desktop due to lack of execute
permission.... read more

There are no functional changes in this release. It
just fixes some build issues reported by binary
package maintainers. Thanks to all of them!

Check out
http://vamps.sourceforge.net/qvamps-demo.htm The
blue MPlayer windows are due to X11 hardware
overlay. I actually saw the video.

This release does not have any essential new
features, but two major bug fixes.

First, the "improvement" of V0.95 with the log
viewer is fixed to print out line by line again.
V0.95 prints everything in one big chunk.

The second fix is with multi angle titles. Now
their size should be computed correctly. Thus also
the evaporation factor is correct now.

qVamps now supports a new feature of Vamps
V0.99.1. Gaps in cells, i.e. space that does not
contain any movie content, are now taken into
account when computing the evaporation factor.
This gives a more accurate result of the copy's
final size.... read more

There is only a single change in this release.
Space in DVD cells, that is not part of the movie,
is now detected. These gaps were not copied by
previous versions either, but the occupied space
was incorrectly included in the uncompressed
movie's size. Thus the evaporation factor may not
always be met accurately.

Both Vamps and play_cell are changed. To enable
the new feature, play_cell must be invoked with
the new -g option. play_cell then reports the cell
gaps' sizes to Vamps. There is no new option to
Vamps. It automatically detects the special
packets in its input.... read more

The next step to our first stable release. V0.95 incorporates all (essential) features intended for 1.00. We have an empty TODO list.

In V0.95 users can now remove all files created by qVamps. The DVD image can be re-created based on a previous run of qVamps. Of course the same source disk again is required again.

There is a new (experimental) feature to handle DVD read errors.

And finally V0.95 also fixes some bugs (refer to the ChangeLog file for details).... read more

The major changes of this release are several
improvements to the build process. There are no
functional changes to Vamps itself. play_cell has
got an extension to handle DVD read errors. This
caused an almost complete re-write of the tiny
program. The new options are:

-i: ignore DVD read errors
-r n: do n read retries (NOT including the first
read)

This release has got a lot of small changes. Most important for end users will probably be the DVD preview feature. You can preview the DVD image which was generated on hard disk and burn it in a separate step. Take a look on the Tools tab.

Furthermore users can easily switch to growisofs for DVD burning. Single DVD device copying should work in this release. And you may change the name of the copy directory as well as the volume ID of the copy.... read more

This is a bug fix only release. Unfortunately V0.19 did not completely fix the issue with the MJPEG Tools version >1.6.2. V1.8.0 has the argument to the -S option changed from 420_mpeg2 to 420mpeg2. Thanks to Laurent!

V0.19 integrates the user adjustable settings.
Even if some (a lot) of them are rather cryptic,
there are a few really valuable items. E.g. you
now can easily adjust menu fonts, colors and
spacing. Or you can change the DVD burner device
and max. burning speed. Please note that the
settings do not get effective before you have
saved them.

Furthermore V0.19 improves error handling during
the actual copy task. And qVamps should now work
smoothly with the MJPEG Tools version >1.6.2.
Please refer to the ChangeLog for more details.

Vamps is ranked number 430 out of >108,000 today. This should be worth a new qVamps release. The first actually usable version is to come in the next days. Stay tuned!

This release has the copy/burning process fully integrated into the GUI. No need to manually execute the shell script commands. A (slightly improved) script is written nevertheless.

A sample DVD program stream for menu background has been added to the distribution (one for NTSC and PAL each). This enables menu generation on Linux distribution that lack mpeg2enc.

A first preview of qVamps has been released. It is a full functional GUI for Vamps that lacks some convenience features yet. Creating the new DVD image and burning have to be done outside of qVamps. A simple shell script is generated, that includes all necessary commands. It may be adjusted and then started from the command line.

A very simple home page has been created for Vamps and qVamps. Take a look and find answers to some of your questions. http://vamps.sourceforge.net/

New in this release:

- The requant module is updated to the latest version from the Metakine web site http://www.metakine.com/files/M2VRequantiser.tgz This breaks backward compatibility to a certain degree. The new requantizer requires to know the full size of the unshrinked embedded elementary video stream at start time. If vamps is run with a file as standard input the size is estimated from the file' size, i.e. nothing's changed from previous version. But if vamps is run with a pipe as input there is no way to figure out the full stream's size. In this case the user *has to* supply the size of the unshrinked program stream. For this purpose the -S option has been introduced.... read more