MTR extracted chapters (joining)

[thoughton]

I'm probably just being dense (been on holiday for a few weeks, forgotten how to make DVDs)...

I've got a problem disc (4 TV episodes on it) where the menu is unrippable (tried all rippers, cleaned disc multiple times). Seems to be a scratch or other defect. So I ripped each episode with MTR 2.0.1 and ended up with four 1.8GB vobs.

None of these vobs are watchable in Apple DVD Player. When I tried to join them in Sizzle 0.1 I got a weird error (no DVD NAV sectors?!?!). DVD2OneX's join mode doesn't seem to acknowledge them at all (after selecting them there are still red X's next to each vobset in the join panel, and the Start button is greyed out). DVDSP doesn't recognise them either.

I've also renamed them all to .mpg and tried all the above without any joy.

Any ideas guys? Thanks.

[AntnyMD]

If the menu isnt one of those flashy, hard-to-navigate ones (a la Spider-Man et al), chances are it is not encrypted. Re-rip the disc in full disc mode using MTR, then try using Finder to drag-n-drop copy to your hard drive the video title set that contains the menu.

[thoughton]

Sorry I should be more precise. The whole disc is unrippable (it retries endlessly after 31MB) with any ripper. (I tried MTR's force read mode) However I was able to rip the four individual episodes (titles 2-5). I think it's a scratch on the menu part of the disc because when I stick the disc into a player the menu appears but freezes when I try to access any of the episodes (this disc used to work fine).

I just want to get the episodes onto a dvdr. I don't mind losing the menu.

[AntnyMD]

Just one last thing.

Rippers need to read all the disc information to be sure it decrypts everything present on the disc ... but to make a simple encrypted copy, Finder (or Toast) just needs to be able to read the data on the disc.

On discs I've had problems with, it seems I could almost always drag-n-drop the encrypted files to my hard drive. So what I did on those discs was use Toast to make an encrypted disc image (pop in the problem DVD, open Toast and hit Apple-D), then mount the disc image and let the ripper go to work on the disc image.

Since however the menus arent important, you just need to re-author your ripped vobs. VOB files will not play in Apple DVD Player, and will not be recognized by DVD2OneX. Since you have DVD Studio Pro, just de-multiplex your vobs and import them into DVDSP. I would author each episode as a separate track since you may not be creating a new menu.

[thoughton]

Thanks AntnyMD. I demuxed the vobs with ffmpegx - it took ages, for some reason the second to fifth ac3 tracks were at least ten times slower than the first ac3 track - and then built with dvdsp and just the first (english) ac3 before running dvd2onex. Working great, cheers!

Good info about the encrypted copying too. Will remember that.