Have you ever wanted to know what the language codes are for a DVD? They are held as a decimal number in SPRM0 and you can use this value in lots of ways.
For example, knowing the setting for the language code in a DVD player means that you can force your DVD to start up in that language. However, knowing the values your authoring app uses for language codes is also valuable.
Working in DVD Studio Pro it is easy enough to change the simulation preferences to display a different language for the project. You can then examine that value when the simulation takes place, but given the sheer number of different languages it would take someone with the patience of a saint to switch all of the preferences one at a time and then see what the values were.
If you use an application like Haxor (Mac only), you can easily convert ASCII to decimal… but only one at a time. Equally frustrating as a job, and also not converting them to the values that DVDs use.
So I talked with Alex Blanc at Ultralab and he wrote a PHP script to do the job – I supplied the text file with the language codes in ASCII characters, and we were able to export a comma separated list which went in to Excel.
Now, for whatever reason, DVD Studio Pro (and DVD Lab Pro on a PC, and probably ALL authoring apps) add 8224 to the decimal value of the letters. Why? I have no idea!
It was a simple matter to have Excel add that value to every entry and then output the necessary numbers.
OK – I’ll agree with you – not a fantastic market for this piece of knowledge, but all the same it’s another piece of the jigsaw for those wanting to fill in the gaps.
Download the resulting file (in pdf format) here.