Figuring out what is what

[Jackpumpkinhead]

I have been working on ripping a few dvd's of a TV series for my personal digital media collection. So far everything has been going well, but i am not stuck with a bit of a problem. One of the dvds has several episodes on one disc, but there are only a few of the episodes that i am wanting to rip from the dvd. The format of this disc is a little different from the past couple i have done. i cant really tell what episode is what. i am using DVD Decrypter and i can see that there are several VTS's and under each VTS there are several PGC's underneath. so my question is this, is there an easy way to figure out which PGC is the on that i want? like is there a player for these PGCs that i can use to determine if its the video file that i want or not. i realize that i could just rip each on individually and then play them, but i am trying to save myself some time.

any and all help would be appreciated

thanx

[hello_hello]

Can I answer a different question, given I don't have an answer for the one you asked?

If I'm ripping an episodic DVD, this is my process (mostly copied from another post to save with a heap of typing). I use AnyDVD to decrypt the disc and rip and re-author in one go, but the same process can be used by DVDShrink to re-save a DVDs worth of files already ripped to your hard drive.

The first time you run DVD Shrink go into it's preferences. There's an option called "target DVD size". It's set to DVD5 by default. Change it to "custom" and set the size to something large like 50,000MB. That'll stop DVD Shrink from ever trying to shrink (re-encode) the video. Find the option "split vob files into 1GB chunks" and uncheck it if you only want one large vob file per episode or movie.

Open a disc or ripped DVD files on your hard drive with DVD Shrink. Up the top, select the re-author button. In the right hand pane you'll see one or more titles. If it's a movie DVD there'll be one large title which is obviously the movie. If it's an episodic DVD there'll be a title per episode (not necessarily in correct numerical order, it depends on the DVD structure). Click on the title you want to rip and drag it from the right pane to the left. You can drag just the movie or each episode etc. When you've done that, switch to the Compression Settings tab. You can click on each title you dragged to the left pane and then select which audio tracks and subtitles you want to keep. Once that's done, hit the Backup button at the top. Select or type in a location on your hard drive for the ripped files to be saved and start the backup.

Some old episodic DVDs (I really don't understand the DVD structure all that well) have a single title for all episodes. If that's the case you can drag the single title from the right pane to the left multiple times.... once per episode. At the top of the left pane there's a button which allows you to change the start and end points. Select the first copy of the title, open the editor and select the start and end chapters for episode one. Select the second copy of the title, open the editor..... and so on for each episode. When the DVD Shrink backup is complete you'll still have individual vob file(s) per episode.

If you happen to have more than one DVD drive in your PC or you've already ripped multiple DVDs in a set, you can use the above process while adding a second and third DVD etc to the compilation and then back them all up in one go if you want to keep them together.