Sizzle stops with an incomplete VIDEO_TS Folder

[Papasan]

Hello Out There,

I've been working with Sizzle, OSeX and ffmpegX for the past month and a half and have come a long way. I've been able to get the answers I need without posting.....until now. First though, a big thanks to the gurus out there who answered my questions without knowing it.

Here's what's up:

I have successfully backed up a DVD to my HD using OSeX. It creates the one big VOB file.

I then use ffmpegX to shrink it to fit onto a 4.7Gb DVD-R. It does so. The output from this is the demuxed .m2v (video) and .ac3 (audio) files. It also creates a VIDEO_TS folder which is perfectly fine, but has no menus.

I then use Sizzle to create some simple menus, add background pictures, set chapter markers and generate the disc image for burning.

My final step is to use Toast 6 to burn the image to a DVD-R.

All this has worked fine for me until this disc. I have create the Sizzle document (it all looks fine) and hit the "Save Image" button. It cranks for a while (1 - 2 hours I think). I come back to look at the screen and Sizzle is running, but the progress bar is gone and there is no more disc activity. There is a VIDEO_TS folder created with 4 VOB files. One is very small (under 1Mb) two are 1Gb and one (the last one) varies from under 100Mb to 400Mb. Using VLC I can play the VOB files, the two 1 Gb files are fine (It is the first parts of the movie) but the last one plays for several minutes then flashes to a logo of the production company for a couple of seconds and then ends.

I have tried this a couple of times, but the result is almost the same. The only difference is how long the last VOB file plays before it quits. There are none of the other standard files that you see in a VIDEO_TS folder (.IFO, etc...).

My technical particulars are:

PowerMac G4 867MHz
896 Mb RAM
430 Gb disk space
Sizzle version 0.5 (v0.5.0b1)
ffmpegX version 0.0.9a (v0.0.9a)
0SEx version 0.0110a1

Any thoughts?

Thanks!

[galactica]

are you going this route because its free? Honestly DVD2ONE will save you the hastle of 1. using ffmpegx 2. loosing your menu's 3. having to use sizzle to compile your image back 4. having problems with sizzle

The thing is you have to remember sizzle is still beta (is it not)
I noticed that on times it works, on times it does not. To be honest, my recommendation would be to rerun the rip/ffmpegx step because generally stopping half way on sizzle denotes problems with a file or files.

hope this helps

[Papasan]

Galactica,

Thanks for the reply....I don't mind paying for DVD2oneX at all. I just really like to make sure that something works as advertised before buying it. I've been burned badly before. I have downloaded the demo version of DVD2oneX, but it does not allow you to try the "Disc Copy" option on the demo. I also have tried the demo version of "DVDRemaster" from Metakine and their demo will give you the "Disk Copy" option, it just pixelates the video for 5 seconds every minute or so.

Obviously, you use (and like) DVD2oneX. Have you tried the Metakine product? Which do you recommend first?

I don't mind going on your recommendation. You have answered a lot of my questions over the last 6 weeks in other posts.

Thanks.

[galactica]

Honestly, they are both good I have them both.
They both work excellent

DVD2ONE is the one I use Almost exclusively. As you can tell by my tutorials

In my opinion its well woth the price
On your mac you should be able to go from DVD to DVDr in under an hour (based on 4x burn) if you have 2x it would be maybe 1.5 hours total time needed

hope this helps you decide to buy dvd2one

man i should contact them and ask for a kick back for all the referrals i send thier way!

[geek rock]

just echoing what others have said.

for dual layer to single layer transcoding, DVD2ONEX is where it's at.

and as for the sizzle problem - i think you need at least 10 GB free HD space for the program to build the .dmg file correctly. i had exactly the same problem as you the other day - my .dmg was about 25 MB. i had 4 GB free space at that point. once i'd deleted some things i got up to about 11 Gb free, and i tried to build the .dmg again. this time it worked perfectly.

-Mark

[galactica]

didnt i say to have at least 8 gigs free. I think you have to have enough to write the temp files and then the image and then toss the temps, meaning a total of at least 8-9 gigs free for it to work

if i didn't say it here, i did somewhere else. its starting to get hard to remember where i said what!

[Papasan]

I'll go ahead and get DVD2oneX as suggested....but just to close the loop on this. I thought about the HD space issue, but saw that I had 160Gb free on the target drive. However, the source drive only had 8.7Gb free. Now, neither of these drives is my OS drive which has 25Gb free. So, if the culprit is indeed the source drive then Sizzle must use the source drive as it's location for temp space (which seems odd...but hey, that's just me). I will free some space on the source drive and try again just to satisfy my curiosity.

Thanks!

[geek rock]

didnt i say to have at least 8 gigs free. I think you have to have enough to write the temp files and then the image and then toss the temps, meaning a total of at least 8-9 gigs free for it to work

if i didn't say it here, i did somewhere else. its starting to get hard to remember where i said what!

not in this thread, galactica.. i guess 10 GB is a safe minimum to have, though.