Can't rip a DVD - usual tools don't work

[tonyp2]

My family provided to a funeral service photos of a family who had recently passed. They took all the photos and created a DVD image montage that ran on a discreet video screen during the viewings. As it is our property, we received it after the service was complete.

I wanted to make a copy for my brother and sister, but none of the standard tools work. It plays from my PC and laptop, but neither ImgBurn, DVD Shrink, nor DVD Decrypter work. They all fail with file read errors pretty much immediately. I'm pretty sure there really aren't and file errors as the disc plays through perfectly. When I look at the disc contents in File Manager I see the VIDEO_TS and AUDIO_TS subdirectories, and normal sorts of files in each directory. I even tried just doing a copy and paste of the contents of each directory, and that also failed.

I guess it's possible, but I find it hard to believe a plain old funeral parlor would be using any sort of high level protection on a DVD that they hand over to the family once the services are done. Looking for thoughts on what I should try next.

[Cornucopia]

Does it play in a settop DVD/BD player? If so, you should revisit those tools (and add in a few, such as AnyDVD, ISOBuster & MakeMKV). If not, it's because the disc isn't a "real" DVD-Video disc, but more like a DVD-ROM (which could quite easily have encryption or some other type of obfuscation - not that hard to believe).

Scott

[tonyp2]

Thanks Scott. I'll give it a try.

(later...)

You're right. This disc will not play in my normal DVD player.

[cornemuse]

I have a dvd the same thing from when My mother passed. It would not copy. Similar to dvd structure, but different names -> *.ifo, *.vob etc. Renamed vob to mpg (only one vob in folder, about 300 megs, on a dvd though), It worked just fine as mpg with win media player and "win-dvd".

You could give it a try, , , ,
-c-

[pango adiuvo]

I had a friend from church that passed (at 99!) recently and the family asked me to video the Celebration of Life service and wanted the funeral home video put on the same DVD. The Funeral home video was make with software from Funeralone. The disc structurer was crazy, 399 files!
-r-x------ 1 88064 May 6 15:47 VIDEO_TS.IFO
-r-x------ 1 38912 May 6 15:47 VIDEO_TS.VOB
-r-x------ 1 24576 May 6 15:47 VTS_01_0.BUP
-r-x------ 1 24576 May 6 15:47 VTS_01_0.IFO
-r-x------ 1 81920 May 6 15:47 VTS_01_0.VOB
-r-x------ 1 528592896 May 6 15:47 VTS_01_1.VOB
-r-x------ 1 24576 May 6 15:47 VTS_02_0.BUP
-r-x------ 1 24576 May 6 15:47 VTS_02_0.IFO
This went on and on to ...VTS_99_1 for all files groups.
that made 52.3 GIG on a DVD. That just doesn't work!

I run Linux so I can do some things that are difficult on Window$. I decided to make an iso image of the disc. It failed to read many files and had file size of 0 on 169 of them. In the end the ONLY VOB that was any good was 85_1. They could use any of the VOB files but at least their is hope! Last resort... if you have VLC player, it can play an individual VOB. Try them 1 at a time till you find the correct one. That one file was the whole video. ~7 min long. I used it and put the two videos on 1 DVD. Now the wife of this person has passed and I will be doing this all over again.
Hope this helps some one.
To make videos in Linux I use two programs. Openshot and DeVeDe. This is the slickest DVD creation program I have ever seen. Sorry but Linux only programs.
Good luck.