Extracting individual titles from a DVD w/DVDShrink

[netarc]

I have a collection of episodic DVDs (sitcoms, Looney Tunes Golden Collection, etc) that I'd like to rip to HD and split into individual movie files, so that each "episode" can be started individually (e.g., via "videos" feature of Win Media Center). I've already ripped a handful (via DVDecrypter, some in "file" mode and some in ISO).

It seemed easy enough to open up the ripped content in DVDShrink, and use its reauthoring mode; but I'm having a hard time figuring out the structure of one of the discs ... here's a snapshot of the DVD opened in DVDShrink in "full" mode:



As you can see, the bulk of the movie appears to be in "Title 1-19" ... but there seems to be no way to access these individually here, so I switched to "Re-author" mode:



Here the individual chapters are accessible, and indeed viewing titles 2-16 in the preview window confirms that each is a discrete cartoon episode.

However, I'm at a loss when it comes to some of the other titles - again using the preview window, I confirmed that:

Title 1 contains all episodes
Titles 2 - 16 are individual episodes
Titles 17, 18 & 19 are repeats of 2-16, containing 3-5 episodes each??

I figure "title 1" is probably an alias, pointing to (it wouldn't be actual duplicated content would it??), but what would 17, 18 & 19 be; more peculiar, 17 doesn't contain consecutive episodes - for instance, iirc it contains titles 5, 11, 13 & 15.

Is anyone familiar with this type of duplicated structure, if so please advise ... I figure all I really need to pull from the structure is titles 2-16, but I'm perplexed by the addt'l duplicated titles.

Finally, what's the best way to save each title to individual VOB files? I suppose I could "author" 15 individual DVDs, saving each to its own folder, and then pull out and rename the VOBs to a standard filename format (changing extension to .mpeg to play in WMP), but I was hoping there was some way I could author a single DVD and force DVDShrink to write each episode to a discrete VOB file.

[guns1inger]

The odd titles, such as 17, are probably actually playlists, which allow other titles to be played in any order.

Why do you want each episode in a single vob ? The only way to get Shrink to do this would be to select one title in reauthor mode, write the results out to a HDD folder, select another title and repeat. You will end up a long list of video_ts folders, each with a single episode in a single VOB file.

The DVD specification allows for VOBs up to 1000MB is size. A single titleset of, say 2400MB, will have three VOBs; 2 x 1000MB and 1 x 400MB. This is regardless of the number of actual titles in the titleset.

Can you explain why you think you need each title in a seperate VOB ?

[netarc]

Since these are discrete episodes (cartoons), I would like the flexibility of playing each title directly (e.g., via Windows Media Center's "My Videos" feature), w/o having to access the menu or queue up the DVD ISO, etc.

I figured the worst case scenario was to use DVDShrink to individually author each title, but this'd be a PITA. natch. I was hoping there was some way to queue up all 15+ titles I was interested in to author a new DVD and then specify to DVDShrink that on the output it should create a discrete VOB for each title ... but it's sounding like that functionality's not avail?

Any alternative suggestions I may be overlooking?

[guns1inger]

Give Shrink a try. Add all the titles between 2 and 15 to the project and see what Shrink produces. It may put them all in separate titlesets, in which case you will have your VOBs. I would suggest you then use VOB2MPG to extract just the video/audio content as this is more suitable for PC playback than disembodied VOBs. You may have to do this is a couple of goes as there is a little to how many titlesets you can have on a disc.

[netarc]

Sweet, it worked - thanks for the suggestions, gunslinger - I went into reauthor mode, added the titles I was interested in and encoded w/o compression ... each title was spit out into a discrete VOB file, woot! couldn't have been easier - many thanks!

Question, what's the advantage of using VOB2MPG on the resultant VOB files? The titles in questions are strictly video and 2ch audio, and presumably already in MPEG-2 format ... what would the "2mpeg" tool buy me?

[guns1inger]

VOB is a container format that may contain more than just one video and one audio stream. It also has navigation data, and may contain multiple audio and video streams, sub-picture streams etc. If you aren't playing these titles in the context of an authored DVD, mpg is the better format, as it removes an confusion if you later decide to re-author these into a new structure etc. It's not a must do, but certainly something I would strongly suggest is worthwhile.