Playing DVDs from hard drive

[gonz0]

I'm trying to play a movie I ripped to the hard drive (with Smartripper). I have WinDVD 3.1 (tried 4.0 also), and I can add the VOBs to the playlist. The problem is that some of the VOBs play the wrong audio track - either a foreign language or commentary. And there's no option to select which track to play. I think the problem happens because I didn't rip the entire contents of the DVD, just the movie. I no longer have the DVD, so getting more of the files isn't an option.

Any ideas on how I could play this properly? My current workaround is the extract the audio into a separate file and then play that in MediaPlayer while the video is playing - but then, of course, you have synch problems. And there doesn't appear to be an option to disable audio in WinDVD, so I have to try to make my wav file louder than WinDVD. I just want to watch the movie, so I'd like to avoid encoding anything.

I thought about using VFAPIConv to make a pseudo avi, but that doesn't have audio.

[Dave B]

Load the VOBs into DVD2AVI and select the correct track under Audio -> Track Number. DVD2AVI will do all the hard work for you and will leave you with a .vdr psuedo video file and an uncompressed WAV file for the audio. (Remember to click "Save Project" rather than "Save AVI")

Use the vdr file as your video input and the wav file as your audio input within TMPGEnc.

[Dave B]

Alternatively, to watch the video load it into a suitable DVD player. PowerDVD certainly gives you the option to select audio track.

[gonz0]

I tried a demo version PowerDVD, and the only way to play the video was through the "Open Media Files" option. I could open the VOBs directly in PowerDVD and so far it is playing the correct audio tracks. But the option to select the language is disabled - again, I assume this is because I haven't ripped the entire contents of the DVD - just the movie. I tried the "Open DVD from hard drive" option and then selected the ifo, but it wouldn't play - said something about region incompatibility. Anyway, this will allow me to watch the video properly, and that's all I really wanted to do in the first place.

WinDVD appears to have a bug(s) related to playback from the hard drive.