Since this whole lock down thing, I finally re-started a project I've been wanting to do for ages but never got around to it......so now was the time.
Since there seems to be no hope at all for a DVD/Blu-ray of every single episode...I'm making it myself !
Step one - High quality rips of all episodes. (few months back before lock down)
All torrents I've tried to use are rubbish, not even half decent quality to what you expect if you want to put this thing on Blu Ray, plus the rips I found always had the "ABC" Logo or some channel watermarked on the side, ew.
So I went the Stream ripping route. With out a doubt the way to stream these episodes is https://watchtlg.netlify.app/ but with my crappy internet the stream would only allow me to watch it in half decent quality but I was confident that high quality lurked on their servers somewhere. I spent many hours of trying different downloading tools/programs that failed one after the other. Either not getting that high quality rip or just not working at all.
But I finally found something that worked ! 64GB's later of downloading each episode individually I finally got that perfect rip quality *dies*
Here is a screenshot, click to enlarge
Step 2 - Encoding
These files are big....a bit too big. I could just whack these on a Blu Ray as a data disc but it wouldn't look as pretty and legitimate, I want to have it as a proper playable Blu Ray Disc with proper menus etc and due to how the encoding works, it wont be enough space (eg. My 1.6gb Rip of Return of the roar would take 8gb on a playable Blu Ray when I imported it to Nero !!!) So it may seem kinda superfluous to try and shrink the files down thus potentially loosing quality but I knew there were ways to reduce file sizes without loosing quality, just all a matter of using the right compression methods. After trialing many different ways and settings, that 1.6gb file came down to 850mb and now only took 1GB of Blu Ray Space.
Now it was time to encode the other 74 Episodes xD Each episode on average took 35 mins to encode so my computer was working overtime of about 43 hours xD.
Step 3 - Making the Disc project.
Now, I've rambled on a lot..... and if I went into detail on what I done in this section I would probably write a book. I went through tonnes of trial and error and constant changing of things to just improve it that little more because the more I changed...the more I learn....then the more I changed.... xD. So I will just lay out the summary of what I done and leave out the things in between.
I wanted this thing to look and feel like Lion Guard as much as possible, I may have went a little overboard in the end but I don't care xD
Nero is very limiting to what you can do but with some program file modifications it can go a little further.
Nero doesn't allow custom Navigation buttons or video clip preview windows, so I simply made my own and renamed them the same file name as a random selected button in Nero's program files and hey presto it pops up in the program. The black and white versions are instructions, one tells Nero where the highlight selection should be when you select an episode and the other one tells Nero where to show the preview clip. So some light dabbling in photo shop sorts that out.
The backgrounds are always the fun therapeutic part ^_^. I photo shopped different ones unique for each Season. That big "Lion Guard" logo in the middle may seem obtrusive but its important for my nice little 'blend in' with the Introduction videos before each menu appears, I will show you the video later
The intro videos I spent too much time on.....but worth it ! (preview videos to come ). Getting the Logo to sync with the background when the clip finished was easy. Getting the video to actually work in Nero was more difficult as Nero didn't like chopped up videos for some reason and kept bugging out. After many tries with different software this one worked perfectly and nero Liked it, it was so good in fact that my original idea of an intro video got alot more complex and fancier xD.
Well its getting late for me so that's it for now, I will upload video clips of it working in the next few days, just a few more tweaks first :P
Here is a Preview
Step 4 - Bluray Burning and Custom disc Label - DONE
Step 5 - Bluray Case Sleeve - Pending