Replace one episode with another and keep the Menu intact?

[Meritocracy]

I have a homemade compilation DVD consisting of 5 episodes. The last episode was incomplete, and I've subsequently acquired a full version. Is there a way I can reauthor this keeping the exisiting animated menu, and simply replace the incomplete ep. with the newly acquired one?

[pants]

i htink you could do this with pgcedit,

http://home.tiscali.be/debie.roland/pgcedit/

or dvdafteredit, but pgcedit is free.

aside from these you'd need to build from scratch i htink.

[Meritocracy]

Thanks for the reply pants. This indeed seems like it will work.

I'd like the newly acquired episode to have chapter marks like the other 4, so I converted it via Toast 7 using the automatic setting, however, this creates a 1.3Gig size file which once incorporated into the original TS folder pushes it to just a smidge over 5Gig.

Instead of shinking it, I'm sure I could have made this fit as expected using Toast 7's Custom settings, but I'm not sure what the settings should be set to (Average/Max Bitrate etc.), in order to accomplish this. Any advice on this front? All 5 eps. are roughly 40 minutes in length.

[pants]

so you have the file already encoded but without chapters, right? then you use toast to add the chapters but it also does some encoding and makes a larger file?


i don't know if this will work or not, as i've not tried it but just throwing it out there.

do you have access to dvd studio pro? if so you might try building a dummy dvd with this track, with added chapters in it. then build the disc, then use this to import/replace in pgcedit. i don't know if it'll retain the chapters or not though.

[Meritocracy]

Everything worked superbly. The problem was I had originally encoded the file to mpeg2 via ffmpeg. As I had forgotten that ffmpeg didn't create chapters, I then ran it through Toast. This is what created the large file size.

Simply running the original file through Toast with the automatic setting for DVD provided a Vob with chapters, and the size is ideal once put back into the TS folder.

Thanks again Pants.

EDIT: A bit of confusion on my part. The Vob created via Toast (DVD-Video / Auto Settings), is listing the video as being mpeg-1 (same as the original file) in ffmpeg. Why would this be?

In any case, I ended up using ffmpeg to encode the original to mpeg-2 with the bit rate set at 2000. Shoved that into Toast with reencode set to never. Vob size is ideal and I've got chapters so I'm content, however, I'm still a bit perplexed by the Toast issue mentioned above.

[AntnyMD]

Frankly, I'm surprised any of this worked at all.