Ability to rip scenes only and cutting out everything unrelated

[alex_ac]

How can I rip scenes only, without any additional info such as, warning, ads, starring etc. The client of mine has sent me quite few dvds (no protection, regional setting etc), but i have to cut all the scenes manually one by one. I want to either read VIDEO_TS.IFO and know which cells are related to actual scenes and re-encode them using ffmpeg or use some ripping tool to do it locally...

or if any1 knows how does dvd player find start and end points based on dvd menu; can i find this info in VIDEO_TS.IFO somehow ?

The main problem for me right now is that i'm unable to cut (automatically) scenes in the same way they are displayed in dvd menu (same start and end points).

Any help would be greatly appreciated.

[yoda313]

Simplest way is dvdshrink. You can select what you want in reauthor mode. And you don't have to shrink it if you don't need to.

[alex_ac]

what if i have 10k dvds, it should be either fully automated or at least semi-automated

i guess the easiest way would be if some1 can explain where i can find this data in IFO file, something like

scene1 (cell1 0:20, cell2, cell3, ... cell10 10:27)
scene 2 ...
scene 3 ...

if player can recognize any play scenes properly based on dvd menu there should be some data about it somewhere in .ifo

[manono]

Assuming the stuff you want to cut out has its own cells (not a given), then you can easily find and blank it out using VobBlanker.

It'll be real tricky to find with just an IFO to go on since there's no video in an IFO file to show you if you've pinpointed what you want.

[alex_ac]

still way too much time consuming to use VobBlanker.

[alex_ac]

another option ic is to look at dvd menu
7 (JumpVTS_PTT) Jump to TNN 1, Chapter 3
8 Set gprm(15) = mov (0)
9 JumpVTS_PTT) Jump to TNN 1, Chapter16

and based on that calculate amount of scenes and chapters that belong to them

thoughts ?

[filmboss80]

Yoda313 already provided the simplest tool for the job: DVD Shrink in the reauthor mode. A faster, more "automated" single-tool method simply does not exist, regardless of the number of times you re-ask the question. If this is a client project, bill for the hours you spend manually extracting scenes.

[alex_ac]

Everything can be automated (just takes time and research),
at this point i'm looking for some program under linux that will be able to read .ifo

[r0lZ]

PgcEdit can read the IFOs under Linux (although the preview doesn't work any more since a relatively recent change in the Linux kernel). You can examine the cells (chapter points) in the cell table, and note the LBAs ("logical block addresses" = addresses in blocks of 0x800 bytes in the VOB files) of the first and last VOBUs of each cell. You can also use Info -> PGCs Params and Cell Times, that produces an ASCII log that you can save.

You can then probably cut the VOB in segments corresponding to each cell with a tool like VobCut. IIRC, VobCut can be operated via the command line, but I don't know if VobCut works fine under Linux. Anyway, it just cuts the file at a block boundary, so I guess that doing that under Linux is easy.

I can perhaps write a plugin to output the content of the log to a file directly from the PgcEdit command line, and if you need so, I can also simplify the output to leave only what you need. But I'm not familiar enough with Linux to do much more. The difficult part will be to write a shell script to automate the process of parsing the log file and launching a tool like VobCut.

Anyway, there is no safe way to automatically determine for sure in which title(s) the movie or episodes reside, so you will probably never be able to automate the process completely.

[EDIT] Sorry, I can't find VobCut on the web. But a similar tool is jsoto's CutFile.

[alex_ac]

parsing shouldn't be a problem if I know what to cut, merge etc...

do you think you can be able to make this plugin to run in a batch processing mode ?

[johns0]

You will just have to cut all the scenes manually,can't batch cut all the dvds cause the cutter cant determine whats an ad,there is no software out there that will speed up the work.

[alex_ac]

if i follow DVD menu guideline (points that refer to a specific scene) i can do it..
and run ffmpeg after that

[r0lZ]

parsing shouldn't be a problem if I know what to cut, merge etc...

do you think you can be able to make this plugin to run in a batch processing mode ?

What to cut is the main problem. We could perhaps assume that the main movie is the longest title, but it's not always the case, and that doesn't work for episodes.

It is not possible to process several DVDs with PgcEdit (as the user can only specify one DVD via the command line), but again, it should be possible to call PgcEdit from a shell script to process all DVDs one after each other.