Inside DVD-Video

This book is intended to be a complete collection of all the technical information that is publicly known about DVD-Video discs. The official DVD-Video specifications are only available to those willing to sign non-disclosure agreements and pay hefty licence fees; nevertheless, a lot of dedicated people have managed to reverse-engineer nearly all of the format, to the point where it has become possible to create Free Software authoring tools like DVDAuthor and playback tools like Ogle and VLC.

Target Audience
This book is aimed at a technical audience; anybody working on software for authoring or playing DVD-Video, or otherwise messing about with DVD-Video, who needs to have a detailed understanding of the data layout.

Terminology
The terminology and abbreviations used follow what seems to be standard when talking about DVD-Video. Thus, a “chapter” is referred to as a “Part of Title” and abbreviated “PTT” (though it is explained that this happens to mean a “chapter”). There are also various data structure field names that seem to be standard.

Documents
(Don’t do verbatim copying of these.)
 * A useful overview of DVD-Video data structures is available at mpucoder.com. Subsets of this (differing in some details) are also available at MPlayerHQ and SourceForge.
 * Bunch of old draft MPEG-related specs here.
 * Publishing in the Age of DVD

Source Code

 * Ogle is a now-moribund effort at a DVD-Video player, which is still useful as a reference for some subtle points, and also for testing authoring output.
 * DVDAuthor is an open-source authoring tool which has accumulated some useful information in its source code.
 * FFmpeg knows all the details of generating DVD-Video-compliant MPEG files.

Table of Contents

 * Overview
 * Directory Structure
 * MPEG Format
 * IFO Files
 * Subpicture Streams
 * NAV PACKs
 * The Interaction Machine
 * Instruction Set Details
 * Summary of Specification Limits
 * Glossary