Oh, what a tangled web we weave when first we practice to deceive.

[AlecWest]

I just saw something I've never seen before. And since this involves backing up a recently released DVD (likely, with recently concocted protection schemes) - and since I was successful in doing the backup - I wanted to mention the ordeal I went through and what I discovered. This may be a new attempt to prevent backups.

Yesterday, I bought a foreign language entertainment DVD that was just released (won't mention title). I first tried DVDshrink. No go. Then DVDdecrypter. Still no go. Then I fired up my DVDfab Platinum 5.0.3.0 - the latest update in tow. Even IT died half-way through ... just like the other software I'd tried. So, as a last resort, I fired up RipIt4Me - which ceased updates 18 months ago.

RipIt4Me, in combination with DVDdecrypter, managed to wade through the DVD ... but it noticed 2 "protected sectors." And when I tried to recapture the two areas of concern (as RipIt4Me suggested), even IT died in the same place. So, I decided to try a LAST LAST resort.

Using RipIt4Me (w/DVDdecrypter), I copied the files to a directory. The original disk is a DVD9 with 7.488 GB of data on it. And the files in the directory had 7.488 GB of data in it. Then, I used DVDfab Platinum to re-rip (and shrink) the data from that initial directory to a new directory. I expected the new directory would be 4.3 GB in size. It wasn't. It was 3.744 GB in size. Note that this size is EXACTLY HALF of the original size reported. In any case, I created an ISO file with DVDshrink and burned the backup DVD with DVDdecrypter. And the backup DVD plays like a Swiss watch (grin).

My theory? This foreign language entertainment company is ripping off its consumers. To the person who casually browses the DVD's directory, it would look like they'd just bought a full-sized DVD9 version of the program. In reality, the company has created a version half that size (easily fits on DVD5 DVD-R) ... and has somehow managed to "pad" the VOB files to make the DVD9 disk "appear" full. RipIt4Me cleaned up the crap that stood in the way of recognizing the files as valid ... and DVDfab Platinum, in effect, "removed the final mask" to reveal the TRUE size of the data. And the video quality of the backup DVD is identical (no surprise) to that of the original DVD.

Anyhoo, it reminded me of that old saying, "Oh, what a tangled web we weave when first we practice to deceive." And I'm curious to know if anyone else has encountered this kind of deception during a backup. If not, it might be a wave of the future (sigh). But, at least you can back up the thing (grin).

Regards,
J. Alec West

[jman98]

This is the equivalent of posting "There's something in your grocery store that might have poison in it and I know what it is, but I'm not going to tell you". Gee, thanks for not sharing the name of the company or the DVD. Your post was really helpful - not. Now unsuspecting people may buy DVDs from this company with no way to know that they are being ripped off unless I try to copy it.

Look, if you don't want to name the company because you are scared of litigation, just create a new account and post it under that. Otherwise you have done us no favors with this.

I'm not surprised by this at all and I would guess that it's probably from Asia. In Hong Kong there is a real tendency to think that DVD-9 automatically means "higher quality" and I could see some sleazy company doing this. Or it being done in China. They do weird things with Hong Kong DVDs to "improve quality". I've got a Jackie Chan DVD for "The Myth" where they chopped the final minutes of the credits off and put them on an extra's DVD because "there was no room for them on the main movie DVD". Dumbasses. They could have just dropped the video bit rate enough to make it fit. Or the other movie that was deliberately spread across 2 DVD discs (I don't remember the name or I'd post it) for "high quality" (that's what the company said that made it) but only about 60% of each disc was used and the rest was empty space, they used half bit rate DTS (there was plenty of space for full bit rate) and the film was left interlaced instead of being progressive.

My best guess is that they probably made a DVD-5 and were too lazy to re-encode it to DVD-9, so they just padded it to fake people into thinking it's DVD-9. But again, thanks for not telling us who did it. You're a great guy to not help anyone from being ripped off. Thanks a lot.

[tinker]

I think you are overlooking a few points.
It is true that most commercial DVD9 are not full. There is lots of commercials on them, like, What is coming on DVD, Director cuts, Deleted features and other.
Most movies have more than one language, director comments, subtitles, which inflate the file size.
However, when you strip all that you will end up, in most cases, with the file that will not fit to DVD5.
What DVD Fab and other shrink tools do is to lower bitrate so it will fit on DVD5.
Lowering bitrate will lower quality of the picture.

[AlecWest]

Otherwise you have done us no favors with this.

Fine. "Asia DVD 59 - Bon Mua 2 - Mot Thoi De Nho" (Vietnamese). Does that help?

Regards,
J. Alec West

[AlecWest]

What DVD Fab and other shrink tools do is to lower bitrate so it will fit on DVD5.

Exactly ... and that's why I expected the shrinked-size to be 4.3 GB. This is the FIRST and ONLY time I've ever seen DVDfab Platinum "halve" the size of files. BTW, none of the programming was lost. And as I said, the picture quality between the original and backup DVD (in my eyes) is identical. Methinks something else is at work here - a little skullduggery on the releasing company's part.

Regards,
J. Alec West

[tinker]

You should get tools like a Bitrate Viewer and see what you did to that file.
I am not using DVD Fab, so cannot comment on file size, but guess that by default just halves the bitrate.
If you use DVD Rebuilder it will compress to maximum file size to fit DVD5.

[AlecWest]

I am not using DVD Fab, so cannot comment on file size, but guess that by default just halves the bitrate.

The DVD I got is actually a 2-DVD set. Disc #1 and #2 both have roughly 7.4 GB of data. DVDfab Platinum shrunk Disc #1 to 4.3 GB as expected. But it shrunk Disc #2 to 3.744 GB.

You should get tools like a Bitrate Viewer and see what you did to that file.

OK. I picked a random VOB file from the original directory and a random VOB file from the shrunken directory. Here's the data:

Original directory 6783 peak 6614 average (bitrate) - Q levels 8.10 peak 5.08 average
Shrunken directory 4894 peak 3391 average (bitrate) - Q levels 15.36 peak 7.55 average

Two things are possible - (1) the average bitrate was halved, or (2) a protected sector error interfered with Bitrate Viewer's ability to give a true reading. In either case, it doesn't explain the "halving" as opposed to a basic "shrink" job.

If you use DVD Rebuilder it will compress to maximum file size to fit DVD5.

It should be pointed out to those who don't know that DVD Rebuilder needs at least one pro-level piece of software to work (CCE, Canopus Procoder, etc.). Fortunately, I have Procoder ... and the process is working as we speak. I'll let you know the results when it finishes. And thanks for the helpful suggestions.

Regards,
J. Alec West

[AlecWest]

oops ... edited away

[filmboss80]

To address the comment: "This foreign language entertainment company is ripping off its consumers."

It is hard to begrudge a company's efforts to protect the copyright of a movie. Whether mastered to a DVD-5 or 9, most retail DVDs end up costing consumers the same. Depending on the running length and compression scheme of the movie, the visual quality of a movie on a DVD-5 should be quite acceptable to the eyeballs of most viewers.

Like it or not, this situation is the result of rampant piracy; and if you were running a company that distributed commercial DVDs, illegal copying would likely be a concern of yours, too. Not every DVD producer is a high-profit, big Hollywood company.

[AlecWest]

To address the comment: "This foreign language entertainment company is ripping off its consumers."

It is hard to begrudge a company's efforts to protect the copyright of a movie. Whether mastered to a DVD-5 or 9, most retail DVDs end up costing consumers the same. Depending on the running length and compression scheme of the movie, the visual quality of a movie on a DVD-5 should be quite acceptable to the eyeballs of most viewers.

Like it or not, this situation is the result of rampant piracy; and if you were running a company that distributed commercial DVDs, illegal copying would likely be a concern of yours, too. Not every DVD producer is a high-profit, big Hollywood company.

The results of DVD Rebuilder are still unknown. It's a 2-pass scenario and it's taking a heckuva long time.

But...

I don't begrudge a company's efforts to protect the copyright of a movie ... unless those efforts allow a company to deliver a substandard product to the masses who pay for and expect quality. If anything, cheating legitimate consumers (who find out they were cheated) would likely increase the incidence of piracy, not decrease it.

FWIW, I could have driven 7 miles further than I did to visit a video store that "rents" the DVD set I bought - then proceed to "rent-and-rip" the DVD set. But, I chose to make an investment instead and "bought" the set. And when I buy a DVD, I feel I have a right to protect that investment by making a backup copy ... which is what I'm trying to do now.

Regards,
J. Alec West

[AlecWest]

Tinker,

I'm going to let DVD Rebuilder complete the process. But I've been watching the results in HCenc and it looks very much like it will create file sizes nearly identical to that of DVDfab Platinum. The original VOB files in the "main movie" titleset are creating far fewer frames of video/audio than they should ... unless ... the files have been "padded" with blank filler data. FWIW, the bitrate shown by HCenc in the "main movie" titleset area is nearly equal to what Bitrate Viewer showed for the files shrunk by DVDfab Platinum. So, it looks like the protected sector errors "fooled" Bitrate Viewer in the original directory and that "padding" seems to be the culprit. I can't think of any other possibility at this point.

Anyway, the process continues...

Regards,
J. Alec West

[filmboss80]

Don't get me wrong. Making a fair use backup of a DVD you own is perfectly legit. I just had a hard time faulting those who made efforts to protect their products. It seems to me that since they were going to replicate their movies on DVD-9 anyway, they would have felt free to encode their movie at the highest possible data rate. Thus, it seems the smaller bitrate was more the result of ineptitude than a desire to purposefully rip someone off. That's all I'm saying.

[tinker]

It should be pointed out to those who don't know that DVD Rebuilder needs at least one pro-level piece of software to work

Rebuilder has two good encoders, HCenc and Qu Enc, those are free. Yes you can add payed once if you want.

the bitrate shown by HCenc in the "main movie" titleset area is nearly equal to what Bitrate Viewer showed for the files shrunk by DVDfab Platinum.

I am little bit lost here. Are you compressing movie only or whole DVD?

[jman98]

Otherwise you have done us no favors with this.

Fine. "Asia DVD 59 - Bon Mua 2 - Mot Thoi De Nho" (Vietnamese). Does that help?

Regards,
J. Alec West

Thank you. Was that really so hard?

OK, here's what I know. In places like Thailand (good chance it's the same in Vietnam) as a general rule EVERYTHING is DVD-5. Yes, there are exceptions. I have one of them on DVD where a film on a Thai DVD really and truly is DVD-9 - no padding. There is a general perception in the world that
DVD-5 = bad quality
DVD-9 = superior quality
So I'd guess that the company does DVD-5s as standard practice and the market has changed enough that people think that their older products are "bad" because they are on DVD-5, so they just took an older encoder and padded it out to DVD-9 to fool people. Or they might be trying to make it harder for the bootleggers to copy their discs by doing this without realizing that it really won't make things harder. I can't remember the name of it, but I saw some padding of about 1 GB of completely wasted space on a US DVD made by Columbia, but even without the padding the contents of the DVD were enough to need a DVD-9. The padding existed specifically to try to thwart copying I am sure.

In Malaysia, they just routinely encode just about everything to DVD-5. While pressed DVD-9 discs probably do exist, I've never seen one and don't own any.

[AlecWest]

Tinker,

The results are in - sort of. HCenc ran into a number of cells that only had 1 (count 'em, 1) frame. After running into about 3 of them in a row, the process aborted. Here's an excerpt from the log file created:

[09:18:59] One Click encoding activated...
-----------------
[09:18:59] Phase I, PREPARATION started.
- VTS_01: 195,213 sectors.
-- Scanning and writing .D2V file
-- Processed 15,688 frames.
-- Building .AVS and .ECL files
- VTS_02: 3,526,249 sectors.
-- Scanning and writing .D2V file
-- Embedded null records found
-- Processed 177,407 frames.
-- Building .AVS and .ECL files
- VTS_03: 90,126 sectors.
-- Scanning and writing .D2V file
-- Processed 7,244 frames.
-- Building .AVS and .ECL files
- Reduction Level for DVD-5: 65.0%
- Overall Bitrate : 3,628Kbs
- Space for Video : 3,700,150KB
- HIGH/LOW/AVERAGE Cell Bitrates: 7,071/1,964/3,628 Kbs

Take note of the 2nd and 3rd line from the bottom of that log. Had it not crashed, it would have created a set of files taking up only 3.7 GB of space (like DVDfab Platinum did). And the overall bitrate would have been nearly equal to what Bitrate Viewer showed for the files shrunken by DVDfab Platinum.

Bottom line? The entertainment company marketing this DVD set "padded" Disc #2 of the set to make it "appear" to be a full-sized DVD9 just like Disc #1. Therefore, Disc #2 is a substandard product. I watched both the original Disc #2 and backup Disc #2 all the way through (a 6-hour process) and the quality of both is identical.

Oh, well. At least it can be backed up.

Regards,
J. Alec West

[AlecWest]

Otherwise you have done us no favors with this.

Fine. "Asia DVD 59 - Bon Mua 2 - Mot Thoi De Nho" (Vietnamese). Does that help?

Regards,
J. Alec West

Thank you. Was that really so hard?

OK, here's what I know. In places like Thailand (good chance it's the same in Vietnam) as a general rule EVERYTHING is DVD-5.

The DVD set is a "foreign language" set but not foreign in origin. It's produced by a company in California ... and the entertainers are all Vietnamese immigrants (or their offspring).

BTW, the reason I didn't mention the name was because I was primarily concerned with the finding of "padding" and felt the DVD-set's identity was unimportant. I wasn't trying to stiff you or anyone else. I just wanted to know if persons with recently released DVDs have noticed padding activity ... indicating it might be some sort of new (but warped) protection scheme. And I posted the method I used to overcome this difficulty in case anyone else noticed the same thing on recently released DVDs from other sources and needed help.

Regards,
J. Alec West

[Seeker47]

Most movies have more than one language, director comments, subtitles, which inflate the file size.
However, when you strip all that you will end up, in most cases, with the file that will not fit to DVD5.

I've seen other situations where something was going on that was either deliberately tricky, or maybe just confusing to those of us lacking much expertise in the tech end of it. I'm referring to two apparent versions of the main movie showing up when you examine the disc contents with Shrink or some other tools. This effectively doubles the space being used. In several cases, the sizes were either the same or very nearly the same, and in alternately playing portions of either, I did not notice any difference. (That would include any differences re language or subtitle or presence of commentary !) In some cases, the two "Main Movie" version's files may have overlapped or intertwined in some ways that are not clear to me. That is because I don't really understand how these DVDs are put together -- from a technical, authoring perspective, apart from any disguising or protection tricks that may be in play. In some of the cases I'm referring to, you might fit one of the Main Movie versions onto a DVD-5 with little or no compression, if you could successfully separate it out. But often the DVD-5 space would still fall short.

[tinker]

I think if you have two disc version, the first one is main feature and second is all kind of cuts.
If you look at second disk with something like VobBlanker or Remake, you will see that there is lots of empty cells between each section. Sometime this is done for remount buttons to work properly, so it is quite possible that these cells are ignored during compression giving you smaller file.

[HemLok]

< deleted >

[AlecWest]

I think if you have two disc version, the first one is main feature and second is all kind of cuts.

Actually, Asia DVDs (and there have been 59 sets to date) are composed in this fashion:

Disc #1 - Ads for Vietnamese stores, followed by a roughly 2 hour entertainment slot, followed by more ads.
Disc #2 - the same scheme as disc #1 - except the ads and entertainment are different (grin).

The "main movie" part of disc #1 is 2 hours 15 minutes 15 seconds ... and the "main movie" part of disc #2 is 2 hours 1 minute 8 seconds.

P.S. The ads are entertaining, though.

Regards,
J. Alec West

[AlecWest]

It should be pointed out to those who don't know that DVD Rebuilder needs at least one pro-level piece of software to work

Rebuilder has two good encoders, HCenc and Qu Enc, those are free. Yes you can add payed once if you want.

the bitrate shown by HCenc in the "main movie" titleset area is nearly equal to what Bitrate Viewer showed for the files shrunk by DVDfab Platinum.

I am little bit lost here. Are you compressing movie only or whole DVD?

With two good encoders, why did it ask me for the Canopus Procoder directory during setup? Does Procoder do something else behind the scenes?

Also, I was going for FULL DVD backups - menus and all.

Regards,
J. Alec West

[AlecWest]

Thus, it seems the smaller bitrate was more the result of ineptitude than a desire to purposefully rip someone off. That's all I'm saying.

You could be right. They may not be deliberately trying to sell a substandard product. It may be some klutz in the production department who created a DVD5 master by mistake - and is trying to hide the mistake from his superiors, hoping against hope that no one will notice the padding.

Regards,
J. Alec West

[guns1inger]

I have seen legit studio releases out here, with a full length movie (108 approx) plus deleted scenes plus EPK being sold as dual layer releases, but re-authoring with Shrink, without any transcoding, shows the main feature to have been encoded to a file size of around 3.78 GB. And this wasn't some cheap back catalog release, but was, at the time, a major new release. And I have seen this more than once.

Obviously the studio felt it was of acceptable quality, and if it was mostly talking heads then it may well have been. But if they had cut down the menus size a little, and dropped the worthless EPK, they could have put the whole thing on a single layer disc.

[tinker]

With two good encoders, why did it ask me for the Canopus Procoder directory during setup? Does Procoder do something else behind the scenes?

I do not know why does it ask for Procoder, may be few people have it and it is not part of software, but software can use it.
Two encoders it has are good, but some people on forums have objections about speed and other little details.
There is also CCE basic (around $50) encoder that can be used with this software.

[steptoe]

I've also had a true DVD-9 foreign language movie with English subtitles, official PAL release from within UK

My standard combination of the latest release of AnyDVD with DVD Decrypter was well and truly confused when ripping the full DVD, there was so many false cells and junk on the DVD it just couldn't handle it and claimed it would take hours to rip it instead of no more than about 25 minutes maximum

I tried the DVD ripper that AnyDVD also has instead of DVD Decrypter, and that ripped it first time with no issues. Since then I have had a couple more that AnyDVD/DVD Decrypter struggled with, but using the AnyDVD Ripper again ripped it first time

Then just let DVD-RB Pro do a full movie encode with subs and everything was fine, it plays perfectly and I still have my original if the backup gets damaged or lost


I used to use CCE, but now use HCEnc as its faster and works in true multi-tasking on my Quad 6600 and has more tweaks and settings to squeeze the very best out of the source to fit on a single DVD

[AlanHK]

I had a similar disc recently.

I live in Hong Kong, and I often buy used DVDs at our local charity shop. British, American, and of course many made in China.

One I got had a very long compulsory section of FBI warnings, etc, etc, so I decided to rip it to simplify. (They have these even on bootleg disks, just to add to the verisimilitude.) The label said "DVD-9", but this is almost always a lie, so I was surprised to find it was in fact double layered when I put it in my PC drive. But then I was surprised again to see that there were two main features, when there was only one on the menu. Comparing them, I found they were in fact identical, and the second feature was not even linked to the menu. Further, the audio was unusually large, and turned out to be uncompressed wave. So I copied one of the video files, compressed the audio to high rate AC3, and had a fileset of less than 3 GB ready to author, of identical quality to the original. So I threw in an extra feature to fill it up.

Since I only paid a dollar for this I wasn't angry, more amused. I guess the (probably bootleg) DVD company had ordered a high-quality rip from their supplier, who didn't have access to the full DVD-9 rip, so faked it.