Ripping DVD Home Movies

[quxote]

Hi All,

I have had such great help with another project I am working on so I was hoping someone might be able to help with this one.

A family member gave me 2 home movie DVDs, as far as I can tell these DVDs were of old Super 8 home movies. Here is what they did.
Years ago before DVD they projected the home movies on to a screen and recorded using a VHS camcorder. Recently they transferred the VHS to DVD with a stand alone recorder.

I have been asked to add music to the movies. I plan was to rip the DVD using MagicDVD ripper to my hard drive. Add music with VDub, then re-author the DVDs.

Here is the problem, when I try to rip the one of the DVDs, MagicDVD ripper gets "stuck" and does not rip the entire DVD. When I try to rip the other DVD, MagicDVD ripper does not see the Home Movie at all. Both DVDs will play in my stand alone DVD player, but neither will rip to my computer

I have tried several ways to get the footage on my computer, MagicDVD ripper, Copying the Folders directly, and anything else i could think of.

The only other thing I can think of is to play the DVDs with my stand alone player and use my MiniDV camcorder pass-through to capture them to my computer in realtime.

Before trying this long process I was wondering if anyone else might have a better method.

P.S. I know going back to the original 8mm source and re-capturing would be best, or even using the original VHS would be better, but neither are available anymore.

Has anyone ever had this problem before, of not being able to rip a home made DVD?

[minidv2dvd]

might just be bad media. if you have another computer try them in it. a different drive might be able to read them. also you might first clean them with warm water and a little soap to remove any grime. dry with a cotton dish towel, not paper.

if nothing works try isobuster, it can re-read stubborn sectors.

[Krispy Kritter]

They shouldn't need to be "ripped". As they aren't commercial discs, there isn't any copy protection. You should be able to simply copy the video_ts folder from the DVD to your HDD. If it won't copy, then there is likely an issue with the disc itself.

Do the discs even play in a standalone player or your PC?

[jman98]

Most of the DVD blanks sold in the USA are of abominable quality. I have a friend who buys crap discs all the time to burn stuff for me (he likes to give me DVDs of old music performances that aren't available anywhere in the world on DVD). As soon as I get one of his discs, the first thing I do is rip it to my hard disk and then burn it to a new disc. I get sector errors all the time from his crap discs and it takes a while to get the disc copied to my hard drive. The only consistently reliable media sold in the USA any more is Verbatim and Taiyo Yuden. minidv2dvd is probably right that bad media is probably your problem.

[lordsmurf]

Buy better media. See http://www.digitalfaq.com/reviews/dvd-media.htm