Access VROs from DVD-RAM success Mac & PC

[edwinbradford]

Hi Everyone,

I wanted to pass on how I finally managed to do this in the hope that it's useful for others. I'll cover PC and Mac, also, I'd be greatful if a moderator would move this post to the best folder(s), thanks.

Here's a quick answer:

Mac users have it best with a combination of Toast and Cinematize, works flawlessly, or can try MPEG Streamclip but I dont know if streamclip will access the VRO direct from the DVD on OSX. PC Windows users can do it direct with MPEG Streamclip for Windows (Freeware).

Long answer:

Until recently I'd always used a Mac and when I bought a Panasonic standalone recorder wanted a means of moving captured video from the Panasonic to my Mac with it's internal Pioneer 107/8/9 drive (whatever). The only way to do this was by burning to DVD-R disk on the standalone as Pioneer 107/8/9 didn't support DVD-RAM and that meant finalising and using up a disk each time. "How nice it would be", I thought, "to do this with DVD-RAM disks that were re-writable". Then, Pioneer released the 110 internal Mac & PC writer which supports DVD-RAM media and I picked up one for £30, around $60 I think, cheap.

For anyone that doesn't know, and I'm no expert, DVD-RAM disks, at least on the Panasonics, store the video in a file called "VRO"s whereas most media such as DVD-R store the video in "VOB"s. VOBs have widespread software support whereas VROs have almost none but I finally cracked it. On the Mac, things seem better, the only way to access your VRO is to use Toast, sorry, I don't have access to the details right now as I'm on PC with limited Mac access but you use Toast's DVD Video tab I think to access the VRO. There is a post here somewhere that will help you if you can find it, the good news is it works flawlessly and I believe all your tracks show up properly. I think Toast mounts the DVD-RAM VRO as a VOB or something, anyway once done you can access it as standard.

At this point I used to use Cinematize. Cinematize is a fantastic program, excellent documentation, gives you the option of either extracting raw footage as it is or converting it to another format such as quicktime or mpeg4. There is another FREE program called MPEG streamclip that should also give you similar options to Cinematize but I never tried it on the Mac so I don't know how the Mac version compares to Cinematize.

Mac users can stop reading here. Now for all you Windows users:

I recently changed to Windows for the 3D support, from the posts I've read across the forums, VRO extraction on Windows has given a lot of trouble, Windows has the advantage of longer established UDF support for DVD-RAM media but there's no Toast for Windows and no Toast means you can't use Cinematize for Windows because there's nothing to make the VRO accessible.

Instead, the software I've seen listed for accessing VRO's on Windows is Womble MPEG Video Wizard, Panasonic's own DVD Movie Album SE and Panasonic's DVD Movie Album Tools. There are others but they all seem to fail in some regard, a particular problem is when you have more than one track, many applications don't see the second track.

Womble is payware, I've tried and it works fine but has a cheap looking interface and doesn't appear to have many export options from what I saw. The Panasonic applications I haven't been able to find. They appear to be more widely available in Japan and are given away with some recorders, don't ask me which. I've also read that they either work only with NTSC or PAL depending on which version you buy, I don't know if there's a cross platform version capable of reading both standards. I also saw one thread that said you need a Panasonic internal drive, however someone may have been getting that mixed up with a DVD-RAM compatible drive.

A better, free application I found, not referenced anywhere, appears to work great: MPEG Streamclip for Windows, the port of the OSX application. It supports all the export options Cinematize does which means you can either extract elementary (raw) footage, or convert it to AVI, Quicktime, MPEG4 or whatever straight from the DVD. When I tested it with a VRO containing two movies, it suggested I "Fix Timecode Breaks" which I did, this happened quite quickly and resulted in one VRO file in the file list. On playing to the end of the file I found my second movie butted up against the end of the first, completely selectable on the timeline for export.

Hope that's helpful to other users, I have no idea what Unix users are using or whether there's something that lets them access DVD-RAM content easily.

[Schmendrick]

No offense, but if you just did a search for DVD-RAM in this forum then you would have found out that with any DVD-RAM-capable DVD-drive and the appropriate DVD-RAM-drivers they are shipped with you can just copy the VRO-file to your harddisc then demux it with any MPEG2-demuxing application, author it to a DVD-Video-structure and burn it as a DVD! As simple as that without the need of any special software just good freeware programs.

[edwinbradford]

No offense, but if you just did a search for DVD-RAM in this forum then you would have found out that with any DVD-RAM-capable DVD-drive and the appropriate DVD-RAM-drivers they are shipped with you can just copy the VRO-file to your harddisc then demux it with any MPEG2-demuxing application, author it to a DVD-Video-structure and burn it as a DVD! As simple as that without the need of any special software just good freeware programs.

Thanks for the feedback, no offense taken, although I thought I made it quiet clear that I have researched this quite a lot. I've seen your suggestion discussed elsewhere, generally I read it wasn't a great solution but maybe a workaround and that some VROs would work like this and some won't. Again a big part of the problem is whether or not your demuxing application will recognize more than one track in the VRO. Also, isn't it going to be much slower and use much more disk space if I have to copy the entire VRO (DVD) to disk even if I only want to extract 10 minutes of it?

Have I missed something?

[Schmendrick]

Using ProjectX for example you can also directly access the VRO-file from the DVD-RAM-disc and search for the part you want to extract and then extract and demux it directly to your harddisc.

[edwinbradford]

ProjectX looks like it might do the job but I don't know if it has as many extraction choices as MPEG Streamclip, plus the latter doesn't require Java and works on both Mac and PC.

Any feedback on your original suggestion of just copying the VRO to your hard disk? Were my comments wrong?

[edwinbradford]

Sorry, just went to the ProjectX site and downloaded the "source" files. There's no binary, .exe, or installer and you're asked to compile the program yourself, fine if you're into that kind of thing, I'm not.

Here's a simple question, have you tried MPEG Streamclip? For converting MPEG2? For extracting elementary streams? With more than one track VROs? Is there anyone in the PC forums that has tried it? I know Mac users like it, it's got 9.6 in the review column. Be good to get some constructive feedback from someone here who's used it on the PC, especially if they've tried it with VROs. Anything it's lacking or has compared to other applications? There must be a few impartial experts hanging around.

Plus points for not having to compile applications, not having to write scripts in notepad, not having to install ASPI (which won't install on 64 bit anyway), not having to install JAVA etc. etc. I still haven't seen anything as easy and effective (and free) as this for getting VRO content into virtually any format on the PC.

Cheers.

[Schmendrick]

Within the download section of this website you can download a ready made installer for ProjectX which contains everthing. You don't need to download Java seperately and don't need to compile ProjectX.

The reason I was referring to ProjectX is that it can be used on Mac's, Windows- and Linux-systems.

So far I have not tried MPEG Streamclip, but I will certainly do so. On the first glance it looks good and a german user commenting about it preferred it over ProjectX, as he told it was superior in handling problematic MPEG-streams.

Thanks for the hint!

[lordsmurf]

Panasonic does an awful recording job that frequently leaves users with audio sync problem or other random errors.

An very necessary extra step for dealing with Panasonic files is to drag it into something like Womble MPEG Video Wizard, and then letting it re-encode the non-compliant AC3 audio (the root of the problem) into MP2 audio. It corrects the Panasonic problems. For whatever reason, the Panasonic Dolby encoder does a poor job.

As far as accessing the file, it's just another disc as far as the computer is concerned. Windows XP and Mac OS X should have no problems here.

[trhouse]

I have heard of this audio sync issue before but in over 800 VHS and VHS-C transfers to dvd with Panasonic DMR-ES10, ES30V, and ES35V's, I have never once seen it. My old Adaptec AVC-2200 capture device is another story. With that device maybe one in 20 transfers had an audio sync problem. The solution was to recapture. For some reason, the sync offset would occur right at the beginning of the capture and contiinue thoughout.

[edit] The information regarding Panasonic Movie Album can be found on this thread.

http://72.14.203.104/search?q=cache:pYPFw5MzF4MJ:www.videohelp.com/forum/archive/t2769...s&ct=clnk&cd=2

I have a copy which I bought from Panasonic for $8.29, but it would not install unless it found a Panasonic drive. I believe Movie Album is also supplied with some LG drives so it will probably install if it finds an LG drive. Mine was a Toshiba.

[edwinbradford]

Thanks everyone. This has turned out to be a really great thread, I've learnt some stuff I certainly didn't know. Schmendrick, sorry about the ProjectX download, I realized a day later after I posted that I had seen the precompiled version here and forgotten about it. Ironically, MPEG Streamclip isn't working now on my OSX version but as I'm running a relatively new version, 10.4.6, on an AMD PC for which it's not designed I don't think I can complain.

Likewise I've not noticed any Audio Sync issues on my Panasonic E55, I'll watch out for it. I think DVD-RAM disks require UDF 2 support? It's relatively new to the Mac so Mac users may have trouble seeing the disk at all unless they update OSX to 10.4.x or maybe get away with 10.3.x. I know I had to update OSX for the DVD-RAM to mount on the desktop and even then the contents could not be copied to a hard disk, maybe it's better now.

[Oscar wallace]

Likewise I've not noticed any Audio Sync issues on my Panasonic E55,

No me neither in the 2 years I have owned it, also the machine as been a 100% reliable unlike the thousands of JVC machines that in the same time period have sufferd the "LOADING" problem, though if you wear rose tinted glasses it seems to effect only a handfull.

as Pioneer 107/8/9 didn't support DVD-RAM

Well my 107 does unless its a Mac thing....

[edwinbradford]

Yes, it's a UDF mac thing I think. Now resolved though.