Some hints for 99 items limit / speed / ease of use

[Former user]

Hi,

first of all, thank you for your great work. As you're not reading the forum - here are a few things you should consider:

• 99 items limit can be overidden by not using menu's for the select screen but pictures or somewhat. check out the wasabi dvd menu - they use dvd styler as well and reach 512 items with the same last-sector-read table stuff

• automatically put .dvd and all other except iso files to a different directory than the games directory. Background: The xkey always hashes all files below the games directory before it starts up. although those files are not that big in size, it takes ages. when they're gone, you are at least 3 times faster.

• please use dvdstyler portable. with that, all comes with one big package that could be put to the hard disk you're using it on. that makes life easier when using multiple pc's

Again, thank you for your effort!

Cheers, Poolcat

[巴蒂斯Badisi]

Yeah sorry for the forum, right now I'm mostly focused on a new xbw version development.

• About the 99 limits you can find some of my thoughts on the forum or on the FAQ.
  To summarize: dvds file generation is already optimized in xbw. In fact it's already possible to build a dvd-menu with more than 99 items (tested with 432).
  Problem is that games beyond that limit will just never load on tv... you go back to dvd-menu...
  As I see it, it's whether an issue with the xsk sector generation (but the algorithm looks fine to me) or an issue with the xkey not being able to read the xsk properly.

• Any idea why the xkey would do those hashes ? (I may consider adding it as new feature, like iso automatic renaming)

• What issues are you facing with dvdstyler portable ? Is xbw not able to use it at all ?

Thanks!

[Rene]

yeah, no worries - the forum is dead anyway...

99 Items - well, I had a look at the former xsk generation and it looked pretty straight forward. There are several reasons I can imagine - e.g. still the 99 menu entry limit (who knows how the xbox deals with it) or an address overflow in the xsk table. I'll check that later as I've no time currently. If I find the Wasabi dvd style file I'm going to send it to you - they used pictures instead of menus (less comfortable but it works 99+). Maybe you can send me the current xsk generation you use. and btw: 99 doesnt seem to be a technical barrier - that would be 128 ;)

hashes - well, i have no idea :o) I read that somewhere a while ago. So i tried it out and went from nearly 5 mins startup time to 40~50 secs. I ended up with the menu.iso/xsk in games directory and all isos (and just the isos) in a folder below called xiso. That works great for me.

dvd styler - its simple, it chrashed. but anyway, thats just a thought. It saves the hassle from having dvd styler installed on multiple pcs in maybe different version. I like the idea having all needed files on the external hard disk and can generate the menu w/o running in version conflicts or missing dependencies when using different machines. You dont have to include it but a "download portable" button that just saves it to a dvdstyler directory underneath xkeybrew would be cool. And btw, all users would use the same version and you dont need to versionjump around to get an error reproduced...

Thanks for your time, dude!

[巴蒂斯Badisi]

99 items

My first thought on the 99 limit was that the old dvdmenu was not optimizing the dvdstyler file creation.
So I've implemented a better process based on the following limits imposed by the DVD-Video specifications:

There can be no more than 99 titlesets, no more than 99 menus in the VMG or a titleset and no more than 99 titles in a titleset.
Each title may be made up of up to 999 PGCs. Each PGC may consist of up to 255 programs.
The <pre> and <post> sections of a PGC put together can contain no more than 128 VM instructions.

The result is that now it's possible to build a dvd-menu with 99+ items.
I've tested it with 432 items and the iso generated by dvdstyler is working fine (at least on VLC).
(so here we don't need to have a look at the wasabi dvdmenu file)

The real problem: once played through the xkey, the 99 limit still exists (you will get back to main menu for item > 100)
We can conclude that the problem is with the xsk file (it's just a map of dvd-menu sector and file path, so pretty straight forward yes)

Which give us 2 options:
1) overflow in the computation of dvd-menu sectors > 100 (xbw side)
2) misreading of dvd-menu sectors > 100 (xkey side)

If 2) is working fine with wasabi then our issue is 1).
If you have the knowledge and the time to help on that point you are more than welcome ;-)

hashes

I will add an option in xbw 2 to auto-magically reorganize .iso and .dvd files.

dvdstyler portable

I'll need to have a closer look to that. But I'm not sure to go that way as it's only related to windows (and by essence xbw is multi-platform)

[Rene]

99ers - well, i found the wasabi .dvds and yours is looking even better. So its back to what you said - somewhat xkey. I'm going to warm up my eclipse install but that might take a while.

what makes me wonder here is that you directly rush back to main menu... I gotta give that a try first. It is not reverting with the wasabi ISO.

hashes - keep in mind to move away all other files than iso. lots of users will have nfo files or such in there. Thats slows down. Also remove the .dvd files (havent had any layerbreak problem without them) and of course, you should test that on your own first. I'm just saying having just isos in the xISO folder below games is speeding up mine ;)

dvdstyler - no problem with that. It's working fine here (problem was that i had version 2.0....), so all is good. You can leave that decission up to the user.

[Daniel Nowosielski]

Hi, it's rejdzu. I see that after 3 years everyone is struggling with this 99 limit :) As I remember correctly problem with that is that for titleset dvdstyler creates links. it goes like: if (g0 == 1) jump menu 1 else if (g0 == 2) jump 2 ..... This is the problem. If you create menu with 99 games per titleset then those commands will get truncated. As I remember you need to be more clever with creating menus. I think that there is limit on length of commands (like 256 character or somethin)

But it sadly means that 999 games will not be possible. But a lot more than 99 :)

[巴蒂斯Badisi]

@rejdzu Hi rejdzu ! Long time no see :) Well yes.. still struggling with this 99 limit...
But like I said in my previous comment above it's not a matter of optimizing the dvds file creation because this was the first rework I've made and it now allows us to build a dvd menu with at least 432 items. The problem is when you run this menu on xkey, every game > 100 will get you back to the main menu. So to me the issue is within the xsk file (either xbw is not generating it properly or xkey is not reading it properly).
I'm currently working on a 2.0, no more java but node instead :) and will investigate this issue later on.
I'll keep you posted if you are interested ;-)
Thanks

[Laurent]

Hi Badisi, I hope you are well Have you some news about this 99 isos limits ? This time i tried many apps (unstable, stable, yours, etc...) to convert dvd.iso (generated by DVDStyler) to xso and xsk files (perhaps this is the final step was the key of this problem). But no sucess for the moment. !

[巴蒂斯Badisi]

@koala0145 Hi Koala, no I don't have any news unfortunately. Only few people seems to care about it now (as for k3yforums that went down). But I'm still working on 2.0 from time to time and wish to release it, I just don't know when. I've made an announcement on the home page to seek help if you are qualified and interested. Thanks