Probably an unusual problem... converting hundreds of M2Vs

[GohnJotti]

I have a DVD which, among other features, has an otherwise unavailable copy of the screenplay. Unfortunately, rather than put it on the data track as a text file, as normal people would do, the lunatics who designed the disc scanned each page, added ugly borders to the scans and encoded them as video. (The disc is "Hoffa").

I found the VOB with the screenplay and demuxed it into almost 500 M2V files, each of which contains a few pages of the script as sort of a slideshow. (It's a Mamet script... it's pretty short by his standards :P)

Now, trying to convert each of those M2Vs into a series of images manually, from something like VirtualDub, would be impossible, so... is there a tool that could do a batch conversion such as this? Take those hundreds of M2V and extract each frame from each of them into a separate graphics file...?

[gadgetguy]

Using something like VirtualDub use Save Image Sequence.

[adam]

Yeah that was what I was going to say. It will spit out each frame as a separate image file (.bmp or .tiff.) But you should actually use VirtualDubMod instead since it will load m2v files directly.

But first thing, delete those 500 m2v files and start over. Whatever ripping software you used, set it to not split files. This will give you one large m2v instead of many. Then you can import this directly into VirtualDubMod and use the save image sequence option. The whole process should probably only take a minute or two.

[gadgetguy]

But you should actually use VirtualDubMod instead since it will load m2v files directly.

If the m2v files are numbered sequencially you should be able to append the whole sequence in one shot.

[mikiem]

"Unfortunately, rather than put it on the data track as a text file, as normal people would do, the lunatics who designed the disc scanned each page, added ugly borders to the scans and encoded them as video."

FWIW, that's DVD spec... TVs don't understand text...

As Adam posted, you've likely got a video where each frame is one of these pages. Amplifying on his post a bit, I think the way I'd do it is first find the vob including the text content -- easier then it might sound, simply open them one at a time in something like PowerDVD, or open them all and use the "next" button to jump from one to the next. You do have to open the vobs though as media files.

Now you've found your vob, open it in DGIndex, marking an in & out point if you want. Create a project file, then write a 2 line text file (or let the software do it for you) with the .avs extention. Open this in VirtualDub, fine tune your in and out, set cropping if desired, and save image sequence or whatever you want.

V/Dub, Avisynth, DGIndex are found here at videohelp in the tools section. The script would be (filling in your paths):

loadplugin(".\dgdecode.dll")
mpeg2source(".\your_d2v.d2v")