Split VOB chapters without re-encoding everything (must be freeware)

[fmcf]

Hi,

First of all, sorry if this topic has been discussed before, but I wasn't able to find exactly what I'm looking for.

Here is my story: I have a Sony DVR-DVD405 camera and one of my MiniDVDs got bad scratches which damaged a few MB. The disk has 4 titles with the first title having about 92 chapters. Chapters 2 and 3 have 5 chapters together and chapter 4 is just a slideshow (i.e. can be discarded). Sony software that supports Vista (Picture Browser) has a UI bug where the selection boxes won't be enabled if the software cannot load ALL of the clips (I can read 94 out of the 97 existing clips). So, because of these 3 offending clips I lost access to everything :-(

So, what I have now? I got a program that made me able to copy everything from the MiniDVD to my computer, ignoring errors. I lost a few frames and everything looks almost perfect in Media Player. I can watch everything and no errors are shown.

What I'm looking for is a tool (must be totally free, this is a one-off that happened by accident) that make it possible to split the chapter into MPG files (without recoding, just extract them and re-repackage without changing a bit) so I can do my edition and get rid of this disk.

Any light?

Thanks!

PS: Sorry, I'm really, really cheap... :-)

[manono]

Vobblanker can do it, although I'm not exactly sure if this is what you had in mind:

http://jsoto.posunplugged.com/guides/VobBlanker/splitting_cells/index.htm

[fmcf]

Thank you! Looking at it right now to see if it does what I need.

Just to clarify, what I need is to get those 92 clips that are bundled in the VOBs as 92 MPG files so I can play with them in the editing tool.

[manono]

Like I said, I wasn't sure if creating new chapters was what you really wanted. Now you say you just want to break out the 92 original MPGs. So just use something like MPEG2Cut or even DGIndex which will demux as it separates the various sections you isolate using the [ and ] buttons. Or create the chapters first using VobBlanker and afterwards separate them into their 92 pieces. That part will be easy once the proper chapters have been created. None of these solutions (and others, I'm sure, that others might suggest) will involve anything being reencoded.

[fmcf]

Thanks again! I'll see what I can do and will post the result here.

Just for information purposes, here is what I have already tried before asking for help:

1. Use Picture Browser to load the DVD. When it fails to read the bad files, attach UI Spy (from Microsoft's .NET Framework) and try to mess up with the interface so the "Select All" button get's enabled. Ok, that was a desperate hack :-)

2. DVD Shrink didn't do anything in this case, since it also expect a perfect world. It totally crashes in the first error.

3. JFileRecovery did a great job copying the damaged files ignoring the errors.

4. Use DVD Shrink again to reconstruct the DVD ISO. Then use VirtualDVD (?) to create a virtual drive using the ISO file and try to read using Picture Browser. PB complains that "this DVD was not generated by Sony Camcorder". *%A$^**@&!!!

5. Use VOB2MPG (?) to generate MPG file from the VOB. Didn't work, main VOB has 24 minutes and 92 chapters. It got lost in the middle and the generated MPG doesn't play completely.

6. Use VobEdit to demux the files. It would have worked perfecly if it was not the fact that the audio files are 2 or 3 seconds longer than the video (i.e. video is getting trimmed at the end). Nothing...

7. Tried a bunch of commercial software. They don't do what I need. MOVAVI will create a big MPG and it will re-encode everything. ULead is so smart that it renders the subtitles without giving me a choice. Sonic crashes all the time.

I wonder why such a simple thing can turn to a problem this "impossible"...