unfinalized mini DVDs (tried dvdisaster/isobuster/etc)

[chconnor]

Hi!

I have a stack of my father's un-finalized mini-DVDs from his broken camera. A million hours of family footage.

dvdisaster extracts the ISO beautifully, and i compiled and used the dvchop.c thing you see around to extract VOB's, and cat'ed them together (in linux).

Resulting large VOB has a glitch every 19 secs or so (a bit unpredictable) where it seems like 2 or 3 or 5 or so frames go missing. Playback hangs for a split sec, then continues.

Got and paid for IsoBuster, and tried it on the ISO file. Same result. Did the ISO extraction with IsoBuster and tried it on that file. Same result. (IsoBuster does distinguish the individual original VOB files, though, which is handy.) Tried several disks, with no difference. I only have one drive that works for extraction or I'd try others, but it doesn't seem like there's any issue with the reading, generally.

Any ideas? Is there some proprietary camera brand thing at play? I'm pretty sure the camera was writing the disks properly until failure. There are one or two read errors on the disks, but nothing that would explain this.

I'd be very happy to provide any other details, file info, etc, if it'd be handy.

I'm also going to go make a donation to videohelp right now, and so should you if you can, because it's so amazing. :-)

Thanks!
-c

[Cornucopia]

Concatenating the way you are doing it is always going to add garbage to the file.
You should be ripping the disc to HDD, then extracting the MPEGs from the VOBs, then assembling the MPEGs with a proper MPEG editor.

Scott

[chconnor]

Thanks! - but that's what i did: after trying the concatenation method (dvdisaster -> dvchop -> cat), I started over and used dvdisaster -> IsoBuster and then (starting over again) IsoBuster -> IsoBuster to extract the disc to HDD, and then extract the VOBs from the ISO. Isn't that what you're describing? It had the same result.

(My understanding is that a non-corrupt VOB should play just fine in VLC, since it's just an mpeg-2 stream, right?)

-c

[usually_quiet]

Thanks! - but that's what i did: after trying the concatenation method (dvdisaster -> dvchop -> cat), I started over and used dvdisaster -> IsoBuster and then (starting over again) IsoBuster -> IsoBuster to extract the disc to HDD, and then extract the VOBs from the ISO. Isn't that what you're describing? It had the same result.

(My understanding is that a non-corrupt VOB should play just fine in VLC, since it's just an mpeg-2 stream, right?)

-c

The VOB container is organized differently than an .mpg 2 container. VOBs are organized into cells and chapters, which the .mpg container doesn't support. Although some players will play VOB's by themselves, VOBs are not really intended to be played outside the normal DVD file structure and menu system. The cells and chapters can cause problems during playback when VOBs are played by themselves.

The free version of VOB2MPG might be useful for transferring the contents of the VOBs into an .mpg container, which VLC may have an easier time playing, and which may be easier to use with some editing programs.

[Nata]

Hi,

In the similar situation, i tried 'Split Video' option of CDRoller. To convert the recovered VOB data into MPG file(s). It worked for me.

Nata.

[Cornucopia]

No, in every scenario, you mention concatentating. As in A+B+C=ABC. But that is the problem. Every MM container isn't just the raw encoded packets, there are headers and footers.
So if your A (or B or C) is actually more like HMF (header-Media-footer), then A+B+C is HMFHMFHMF, not HMMMF like it should be.
That is one reason why we use EDITORS (whether full-blown NLEs, or simple cuts-only assemblers).

And usually_quiet is correct. A VOB is not equal to an MPG. Think of it as a super-set of a Program Stream. You wouldn't expect a TS to be synonymous with a PS, so why think a VOB is?

These 2 factors are likely the main reason(s) your video is having trouble.

Scott

[chconnor]

Thanks all --

Are you saying that IsoBuster does concatentation? I only (knowingly) concatenated (as in, joined multiple files into one) in the first route (dvdisaster -> dvchop.c -> cat). Otherwise I just used dvdisaster or IsoBuster to extract the ISO file and then IsoBuster to pull VOB files from it. The resulting VOB files (which I do not join together in any way, and which are on the order of 40 to 300+ MB in size each) all have the glitches within them, every 18 seconds or so, so unless IsoBuster is concatenating silently these aren't resulting from file joins... ?

I tried VOB2MPG, but couldn't get it to work... it seems to want either "VOBsets" (which I don't have, afaik), or to use the IFO files. If I extract the IFOs using IsoBuster and then attempt to use VOB2MPG, I get a failure and stack trace in the window.

Is there no way to pull clean mpeg-2 from a VOB file with ffmpeg or the like?

Thanks Nata, I'll check out CDRoller.

Lots of contradictory guidance on the web on VOBs, huh? E.g. wikipedia, which says "VOB files are a very strict subset of the MPEG program stream standard. While all VOB files are MPEG program streams, not all MPEG program streams comply with the definition for a VOB file"... but I'm sure, as with all things codec-related, that the whole story is more complicated (and compliance != ability to play in vlc). Thanks again for the guidance,

-c

[Cornucopia]

MPEG-PS (Program Stream) and VOB (Video OBject) both contain elementary streams (heck, so does Transport Stream), but what they contain is different. I would say that VOB is a "strict superset" of MPEG-PS not a subset, since it allows containment of LPCM and SDDS audio as well as subtitles which are NOT allowed in standard PS container.

re: ISOBuster, I would say it has the best chance of cleanly extracting VOB files, but I couldn't say it could do it well without seeing a few screenshots of what it was truly up against.
Since these are unfinalized miniDVDs, they could be putting temp data in nonstandard places. Are these following standard "DVD-Video" application spec? or maybe DVD-VR? or DVD+VR? There are lots of variables here.

If VOB2MPG isn't working, you should find out why and fix it. It's not a complicated app, so it shouldn't be having trouble, and in your case is invaluable.

Scott

[hello_hello]

Have you tried simply remuxing the vob files to another container? tsmuxer should be able to extract the audio and video streams or remux the vob file in a ts or m2ts container. Maybe even try remuxing them as MKVs with MKVMergeGUI.

[usually_quiet]

Thanks all --

Are you saying that IsoBuster does concatentation? I only (knowingly) concatenated (as in, joined multiple files into one) in the first route (dvdisaster -> dvchop.c -> cat). Otherwise I just used dvdisaster or IsoBuster to extract the ISO file and then IsoBuster to pull VOB files from it. The resulting VOB files (which I do not join together in any way, and which are on the order of 40 to 300+ MB in size each) all have the glitches within them, every 18 seconds or so, so unless IsoBuster is concatenating silently these aren't resulting from file joins... ?

I tried VOB2MPG, but couldn't get it to work... it seems to want either "VOBsets" (which I don't have, afaik), or to use the IFO files. If I extract the IFOs using IsoBuster and then attempt to use VOB2MPG, I get a failure and stack trace in the window.

Is there no way to pull clean mpeg-2 from a VOB file with ffmpeg or the like?

Thanks Nata, I'll check out CDRoller.


Lots of contradictory guidance on the web on VOBs, huh? E.g. wikipedia, which says "VOB files are a very strict subset of the MPEG program stream standard. While all VOB files are MPEG program streams, not all MPEG program streams comply with the definition for a VOB file"... but I'm sure, as with all things codec-related, that the whole story is more complicated (and compliance != ability to play in vlc). Thanks again for the guidance,

-c

Standard DVD VOBs have a 1 GB size limit. If the video is too long to fit in one VOB, then a VOB set of sequentially numbered VOBs is used to contain the complete video. (For example, the first VOB set would be numbered VOB_01_1.VOB, VOB_01_2.VOB, VOB_01_3.VOB, etc. VOB_02_1.VOB would begin a second VOB set containing a different video)

If your data recovery programs don't produce a complete DVD structure in a folder, or something resembling a standard VOB set so you can use VOB2MPG, then you can use MPEG Streamclip to convert. It can export either a single VOB or a VOB set as an .mpg.

Be sure to carefully follow the installation instructions for the Windows version of MPEG Streamclip at the Squared 5 website. Use "Open Files" from the File menu to import a single VOB or a VOB set containing one video. Allow MPEG Streamclip to fix timecode breaks, then use the "Convert to MPEG" option in the File menu to export an .mpg.

[chconnor]

Thanks again all -

MPEG Streamclip saved the day! And I VERY much love the fact that it has a batch mode, which is going to help tremendously with these many discs.

I assume that "Convert to MPEG..." is the option to save out the stream with no transcoding, given how fast it performs that action, the similar resulting file size, and the lack of any options for that step... sound right?

I don't think there'll be any files over, say, 400MB, so i'm not too concerned about a multi-VOB situation, but I'll cross that bridge if i come to it.

VOB2MPG kept wanting to see only "VIDEO_TS.IFO", but IsoBuster generated IFOs with different names (it's an unfinalized disc, of course, so maybe that's why there's no VIDEO_TS.IFO?). Renaming an IFO to that name and then trying gave a stack trace, etc. Updated windows (.NET -> 4.0) and still no luck. Maybe you have to get the paid version to get access to other filenames or something.

Thanks so much,
-c

[usually_quiet]

Thanks again all -

MPEG Streamclip saved the day! And I VERY much love the fact that it has a batch mode, which is going to help tremendously with these many discs.

I assume that "Convert to MPEG..." is the option to save out the stream with no transcoding, given how fast it performs that action, the similar resulting file size, and the lack of any options for that step... sound right?

Yes, that is correct. MPEG Streamclip repackages MPEG-2 streams in other MPEG-2 containers. It can't encode MPEG-2 to MPEG-2. (At least the Windows version can't. I don't know much about the OSX version.)