DVD2One - Not a cure for all deceases

[SaSi]

I've used DVD2One for quick conversions to single movie DVDs and it's quick and fine for this.

I thought of putting it's very quick re-encoding performance into another use for creating episode disks.

For a 4 episode disk, run dvd2one 4 times, once for each episode, in movie only mode, each time with a custom output size of 1075MB. Then demux the resulting single movie short dvds and extract the m2v stream as well as the (otherwise unaffected) AC3 audio stream. Use them as assets in Scenarist and author a 4 episode disk in less than an hour.

No joy.

The resulting m2v files are out of spec and of no use for assets. Here are the findings:

Video Bitrate
The max video encoding bitrate is reported as 9800000 and adding audio makes it out of spec. Nothing DVDPatcher or Re-Stream can't fix. So set it to 8Mbps.

Cell timing
For some reason, each episode has a start timestamp of 00:59:59:14 or something close to 1:00:00. (Have seen this irritating thing in CCE as well). Again, Re-Stream can fix this.

So after a pass with re-stream, the m2v file was gladly accepted by Scenarist. Done the menu as usually, and off we go. Did a DVD+RW to try out. Playback was fine, quality was excellent, but then, what's this?

Motion seemed to freeze for sub-second duration, and then reverted to normal. Rewinding a bit and playback again, all ok. Hmm! Then in a few minutes, again. Picture froze for a 10th of a second and then ok. And now, sound makes a few 100ths of a second pauses and again ok.

First thought was the bit-rate was too high.

I then burnt (a DVD+RW again ) with one of the single episode 1.1Gb conversions and tried that. Same problems in almost the same spots. Wherever the movie action was increased.

Did a final test. Re-encoded the AC3 file into a lower bitrate (was ~480kbps). Made it 128kbps MP2. Re-authored and re-tried. No problems at all.

The strange thing is that single movies I've done seemed to play ok. But then, again I thought: 45 minutes into 1 Gb? This equals 1.5 hours into 2Gbs. But the average movie is re-encoded to become 4.3 Gb. So, it appears that re-encoding episodes with dvd2one for very small file sizes is out of it's limits.

Back to demuxing the DVD and re-encoding with Mainconcept.

Which, by the way, is a lot slower. dvd2one "re-encodes" a 45min episode in less than 4 minutes. Mainconcept takes almost 20 min. A 5:1 difference. And the difference between acceptable results and unacceptable fast rubbish.

Endnotes: Don't think I dislike dvd2one. I like it and like it very much. And use it (from now on) for what it can-do. Also, the test player I've watched the resulting dvd is a yamakawa 215. It has proven to be totaly capable of handling high-bitrates (can playback a 1500kbps mpeg-1 video + 128 kbps audio VCD just fine). So it's not like I tried it on an old, "SONY" like standalone. Imagine how the disk would play on such a machine.

[rhegedus]

What I did for episode DVDs (before the new version of DVD2ONE) was to rip the DVD in file mode then check which vobs were needed using DVD2AVI and delete the unnecessary vobs and other files. Re-name the 'film' vobs so that they are all VTS_01_x (obviously they must be in order) and if you have too many vobs (>9) then merge some of the vobs with vob edit:

You will end up with new vobs called:

VTS_01_1
VTS_01_2
VTS_01_3
etc

Create IFOs using IfoEdit and then use DVD2ONE.

The only problem I've found is that the chapter points get a litttle messed up sometimes but in general it works well.

However, now that the new DVD2ONE does full disk copy you don't have to mess about any more!

Regards,

Rob

[ASB]

Instant Copy 7 will do this in one go and allow you to remove unwanted audio and subtitle streams.
dvd2one 1.1.1 will also do a full disk copy.