Halp! Missing time when dumping video

[0liver]

hiya, I hate to start a new topic, but it would seem that I don't know enough about what's going on to find an answer.
I also didn't know if this belonged in the newb section or linux
Anyway, I've just recently tried to start doing proper encodes and all the guides say its better to encode audio and video separately. My problem is that when I do

mplayer dvd://1 -dvd-device [path] -dumpvideo -dumpfile ./movie.mpg

I'm always missing time. I did one fillum that's ~1:54:00, but the .mpg that comes out reads ~1:04:00.
It looks okay, that is, it doesn't look like chunks of the movie are gone, but the file is too small as well. So something is missing. I tried it with another one, straight from disc. The same thing happened. I've been tinkering around and searching for a couple of days now, and quite frankly, I'm stumped.
I would say that its an error in mplayer, but I compiled from source and its the same deal, also, its so consistent that it doesn't seem much like an error.
Is it just lying to me? What is going on?

Halp!

[disturbed1]

Could just be something as simple as the mpeg header either being written or read incorrectly.

If you watch the movie from start to end, is it all there? If it's all there, then ..............

[0liver]

Thanks for the reply

I thought of that, but shouldn't it be of a similar size as well? I did seek through the whole movie. I've seen it a couple of times before and there aren't any scenes missing. The video also looks okay.

It still bothers me because the VIDEO_TS (already stripped of menus and extras) is 5.8GB, the .mpg is 4.4GB. That combined with the supposed loss of time makes me more than a little paranoid. Did I lose all that data in the conversion to .mpg? 0.o

[disturbed1]

How many audio/sub streams did the original have? Now compare that to the copied vob.

mplayer -identify blah.vob

[0liver]

1 sub, and 1 audio track (155 MB) on both (the others have already been stripped prior).

So I should just ignore it, then?

edit: Just for fun I tried it with the original DVD with everything intact. The one I had stripped was ~5.8GB, the original was ~7.4GB. Both of them come out as 4.4GB,.....

I searched tools here and found VOBmerge and stuck it onto wine. That one works perfect and the size adds up (5.7GB).

So then, instead of using mplayer I did...

tcextract -i /path/to/movie.vob -t vob -x mpeg2 > movie.m2v
tcextract -i /path/to/movie.vob -a 0 -x ac3 -t vob > movie.ac3


My maths add up now. The m2v came out 5.4GB and the .ac3 came out 257MB. That's close enough for government work.

I'm happy that it works and all (Assuming its okay to do it this way?), but something is clearly broken in mplayerland.

[disturbed1]

I'm more curious as to how you can have an mpg file that is smaller than the original, yet say the entire movie is still there. Something fishy with that.

Unfortunately, if mplayer is ripping a movie, and encounters a scratch, or non readable sector, it will just stop without much of an error. It says something to the effect of - end of file core dumped. But nowhere will it say it encountered an error. Some people would see "core dumped" and think it must be an error, most people wouldn't think anything, because the all important ERROR words are not scrolled out.

If you're content with using applications in Wine, why not just use DVDFab, DVDShrink, or DVDDecrypter? All of which work without error?

Then again, just maybe, if this is a reauthored DVD image you've acquired from somewhere, perhaps there are indeed authroing errors, and that's where mplayer failed?

No matter, in the end, you skinned your cat. And that's what you wanted. A hairless cat