Help! Compressing only parts of a movie

[kothreat]

Hi, I've been going through the DVDDecrypter-DVD2AVI-Subrip-CCE-Maestro motion for a while now. I have a PIII-800, so a 4 pass VBR CCE compression takes me around 15 hours+.

There are some movies that are just a tad over 4.3GB and I hate to spend 15hours on compressing the entire movie (I don't believe in 2Discs movies).

I was wondering if I can save time with compressing only the last 2 VOBs. And before I start making lots of coasters, I was wondering if some kind guru here can give me some pointers as to what to do.

Let's say the original movie consists of 5 VOB's totaling 4.8GBs. I take the last 2 VOBs into its own dir. Use DVD2AVI and CCE to compress these 2 VOBs. Use Subrip to extract the subtitles. Then use Maestro to remux the components back together.

Now I have myself two sets of VOBs. The first 3 VOBs from the original movie, and the compressed equivalent of the last 2 VOBs. Assuming I did the bitrate calculation correctly, they add up to just a tad under 4.3GBs.

My question is how do I use IFOEdit to create the IFOs that would combine the VOBs that play them as one movie on my DVD player?

Any help/comment/better-do-this-instead would be much appreciated!!

Thanks very much in advance!!

kothreat@yahoo.com

[JasonK]

You can recompress only the sections you want, including just the menus.

But your biggest problem is 4 pass VBR. On the first scan of the file, CCE generates a VAF file. And it will use of that to make a m2v file with the average bitrate which you calculate based on the desired file size. When you get your CCE settings tweaks properly, you can get excellent quality without having to make so many passes. Some experts say that more than 2 passes is a waste of time and can actually cause distortions (see doom9.org for more detail.) There are some misleading suggestions on CCE configuration which can cause poor quality. See the forum and guides for more details.