DGIndex or MKVs for DVDs?

[TheLastOfThem]

Just a quick question that has been on my mind.

I am encoding Courage The Cowardly dog for myself (because I simply cannot keep putting my DVDs through handling torture) and I would love to know if for these DVDs if one recommends MakeMKV or DGIndex? I don't quite know the benefit of DGIndex over MakeMKV. Currently I'm using DVD Decrypter with IFO mode to rip each chapters...then feed these .VOBs to DGIndex and produce a .D2V file that fits into MPEG2Source.

Part of me feels using makemkv to split the episodes..and then just using FFMS2 or LibLWAvVideoSource() would be easier...

[Downgraded286]

I have to recommend DGIndex. I just went through this process myself and jagabo and manono finally convinced me of it, after I had some audio out of sync errors.

My process is currently to copy said DVD with DVD Decrypter. You'll see a series of VOBs, IFOs, and BUPs. What you'll be looking at is the IFOs. Each IFO corresponds to a VOB, (or series of VOBs to make up one title). It seems you already are familiar with avisynth, so I recommend MeGUI. Load the IFO into MeGUI's one-click encoder, and you'll be able to create profiles for whatever avisynth processing you want, while simultaneously encoding the video and audio to whatever you like. The only problems I ran into with MeGUI are 1. downmixing seems to reduce audio volume, tick the normalize peaks box to fix this and 2. subtitles won't work as expected, you'll have to extract the subs from the IFOs with MeGUI's vobsubber tool and load the resulting file in the one click encoder for your subtitles. If you do this, make sure you tick the "keep all subtitle streams" box, else it won't work.

[El Heggunte]

MakeMKV is essentially a remuxer.
DGIndex is an intermediate step for re-encoding MPEG-2 video to a more-efficient format (MPEG-4 ASP, H.264, VC-1, H.265, whatever).
Which one is better, depends on what you intend to do.

[TheLastOfThem]

I have to recommend DGIndex. I just went through this process myself and jagabo and manono finally convinced me of it, after I had some audio out of sync errors.

My process is currently to copy said DVD with DVD Decrypter. You'll see a series of VOBs, IFOs, and BUPs. What you'll be looking at is the IFOs. Each IFO corresponds to a VOB, (or series of VOBs to make up one title). It seems you already are familiar with avisynth, so I recommend MeGUI. Load the IFO into MeGUI's one-click encoder, and you'll be able to create profiles for whatever avisynth processing you want, while simultaneously encoding the video and audio to whatever you like. The only problems I ran into with MeGUI are 1. downmixing seems to reduce audio volume, tick the normalize peaks box to fix this and 2. subtitles won't work as expected, you'll have to extract the subs from the IFOs with MeGUI's vobsubber tool and load the resulting file in the one click encoder for your subtitles. If you do this, make sure you tick the "keep all subtitle streams" box, else it won't work.

Can you elaborate on this? I'm interested in retaining subs...but the .VOB of 1 of the titles is 22 minutes long. I want to split each 11 minute episode....so would what you're saying easily split the subtitles too?

[Downgraded286]

Check my thread in this section "keep aspect ratio in avisynth". In it, I make the change from my old clunky process to MeGui, covering the issues I ran into (including retaining subs) and their solutions.

I wonder, do the VOBs containing multiple episodes have multiple corresponding IFOs? I've never encountered this myself, so it's difficult to give advice on that particular subject. I'm sure somebody more powerful than I can weigh in more on this.

[TheLastOfThem]

Not sure about multiple .IFOs...but I am certain one can Extract .IFOs from individual PGCs...as I have just done....I was able to extract .IFOs per chapter chosen .VOB..and then use VobSubber to rebuild the Subs...bit of a longwinded method....

[hello_hello]

I use DVDShrink for re-authoring DVDs for encoding. If you set the target output size in preferences to something large it'll just rip or re-author without "shrinking". It'll rip most DVDs but for newer copy protections you need to run something like AnyDVD in the background, or rip with something else first.

In re-author mode, after opening a DVD, there'll be a list of titles in the right hand pane. It's usually a title for a movie, or a title per episode (not necessarily in the correct order though). You drag the titles you want from the right pane to the left, choose which streams you want to keep, and use DVDShrink's backup function. When it's done you'll have an ifo and a set of vob files for the movie, or an IFO file and a set of vob files per episode etc.
Some old DVDs have multiple episodes in a single title, split into episodes by chapter. For those you can drag the same title from the right pane to the left pane multiple times, and use DVDShrink's edit function to edit each copy of the title down to a single episode (you can select start and edit chapters for each copy of the title). After using the backup function you'll once again have an IFO file and a set of vob files per episode, ready for encoding. I'm pretty sure each will contain it's own subtitles which can simply be extracted with VobSubber and muxed.

No doubt the same can be achieved with DVD Decrypter, but I've always used the DVDShrink method myself.

I've never has problems with subtitles as I tend to do each step of the process "manually". I use MeGUI, but not it's OneClick encoder, and I always output MKV by muxing the output streams myself with MKVToolNixGUI. If you're happy for the output to be MKV......

Another method might be to rip the DVD with MakeMKV, and open the ripped MKV with TSMuxer and remux just the video as a TS file. Or extract the video as an mpeg2 stream (gMKVExtractGUI should do it). The TS file or mpeg2 stream can then be indexed with DGIndex and re-encoded (which should be quite reliable). When it's done, you'd open the encoded video with MKVToolNixGUI and add the original MKV. In the streams list you'll see the encoded video, the original video, the audio streams and any subtitles and chapters etc ripped by MakeMKV. Select the encoded video, de-select the original video, and remux as a new MKV. The new MKV should be the same as the ripped MKV except it'll contain the encoded video instead of the original. If you're not wanting to re-encode the audio, that's another way to go about it. If you do want to re-encode the audio you can still use the same method.... extract the audio from the MKV too, re-encode it, then remux it.

I've not encoded much mpeg2 video inside an MKV myself. Especially not NTSC. Indexing with DGIndex is a fairly tried and true method for Avisynth based GUIs. DGDecode will only output 23.976fps or 29.970fps for NTSC (according to the type of video) and most GUIs can analyse it and automatically apply the necessary Avisynth filters de-interlacing or inverse telecine etc (although you can't beat manually checking and applying them yourself).
There's probably no reason why the same can't be achieved with mpeg2 video in an MKV, although as Downgraded286 discovered, MeGUI's OneClick encoder doesn't handle it well when L-Smash is decoding (it output the wrong frame rate and caused sync problems). FFMSIndex might be a different story. I think the StaxRip developer actually recommends the MakeMKV/FFMS2 combo for StaxRip, but for MeGUI it should be harder to go wrong using a container DGIndex can open.

[TheLastOfThem]

Are there any cons to using FFMS2 or LSMASH OVER DGIndexed source? Less frame accuracy?

[El Heggunte]

Are there any cons to using FFMS2 or LSMASH OVER DGIndexed source? Less frame accuracy?

Exactly. DGindex gives you a frame-accurate index. FFMS2 does not, because it has an issue with timestamps or something, which causes it to return an incorrect frame count (+1 ou -1 frame). As for L-SmashSource, I've never used it.

[hello_hello]

Are there any cons to using FFMS2 or LSMASH OVER DGIndexed source? Less frame accuracy?

DGIndex checks the mpeg2 when indexing and decides if it's "film" (all progressive content), or "video" (interlaced), or some combination of the two and the video is decoded at the appropriate frame rate (23.976 or 29.970 for NTSC).
NTSC DVDs are technically always 29.970fps interlaced, but it's common for them to contain 23.976fps progressive video and "pulldown flags" are used so a DVD player applies pulldown on playback to output 29.970 interlaced. This is the process: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Three-two_pull_down
If pulldown flags aren't used the DVD video is physically encoded with repeated fields to convert 23.976 to 29.970, or it can contain a combination of the two. For "hard pulldown" the original 23.976fps progressive frames can still be recovered with an Avisynth filter such as TIVTC.

It's possible to ignore the "pulldown flags" on playback and decode the 23.976fps progressive video as is, and I "think" that was the problem Downgraded286 experienced with LSmash. His video was mostly 23.976 with pulldown flags but there was a small section of 29.970 "video" somewhere and by default LSmash decoded the whole thing at the average frame rate (a little over 24fps), which put the audio out of sync. DGIndex would never do that.

For a 29.970fps output an Avisynth filter is used to de-interlace or remove hard-telecine if need be, and if the video consists of different types (film and video) it's all converted to a common frame rate. If it's predominantly "film" the 29.970 parts would be converted to 23.976 by dropping frames and frame blending, or if it's predominantly "video" the 23.976 parts are converted to 29.970 using frame blending. Frame rate conversion isn't ideal, but it outputs a constant frame rate for encoding.

LSmash and FFMSIndex have options that'd force them to decode the video in a certain way. They both have frame rate conversion options and both can be told to honour the "pulldown flags" and decode the DVD as 29.970 interlaced video (DGIndex honours pulldown flags by default whereas LSmash and FFMS2 don't), so there's probably no technical reason why you couldn't use either for re-encoding NTSC mpeg2 video, but it adds another "need to know what you're doing" element.

In the case of MeGUI, it's script creator can analyse the video for you and recommend the type of filtering to apply if it thinks it needs it (de-interlacing or IVTC etc) and for the OneClick encoder I assume it'll automatically do all that behind the scenes, but for mpeg2 NTSC it relies on the tried and tested DGIndex system to get it right. For ffms2 or LSmash, MeGUI could probably be configured to handle interlaced mpeg2 better, but the DGIndex system works quite reliably.

If your mpeg2 video is all of one type.... progressive "film" from start to finish, or interlaced "video" from start to finish etc.... then I doubt it'd matter which decoding method you used. It's the hybrid DVDs containing a mixture of types that are a bit trickier.

I live in PAL land so I'm no NTSC expert, and hopefully the info above makes sense. Someone who works with NTSC video a lot might be able to shed some more light on the subject.

[9th_Attempt]

Just a quick question that has been on my mind.

I don't quite know the benefit of DGIndex over MakeMKV. [which] would be easier...

To be honest if easy is what you want, I don't use either. I use DVD Shrink 3.2. It's no longer being developed, but there again, neither is the DVD format! The simplest way to rip & entire DVD & keep all the video(s) intact, with subtitles & commentaries, or simply remove them and keep only the individual video &/or audio files(s) you want:

1. Select 'Edit' then 'preferences'
2. Select 3rd tab, and untick "Split VOB files into 1GB file sizes" click ok
3. Select 'Full Disk' or open disk to read the entire contents of the DVD.
4. Once the DVD menu appears, change "Video" from automatic to "no compression" (or set to your preference of you want to compress the video).
5. Select "Re-author" on the right had side of the top menu. You will then see the main title file(s), and all the little video files below it. Drag & drop what you want to the left had side panel.
6. Then underneath the "Re-author" button click on the "compression" tab again and select none (or to preference) & then select which subtitle/audio/video files you want to keep/discard from the resulting .vob file. Check the compresson setting for each file you are copying, (as each title file will have defaulted back to 'automatic' from 'no compression').
7. Click backup.

No messing around with anything. The entire process takes less than 2 mins to select/deselect everything, & the rip less than 5 (with no compression setting). And the entire .vob file totally intact (with no compression, unless you want it), with only the subtitles/audio you want, all perfectly synced and muxed into just one vob file & everything! I discard all the ifo files etc, and just keep the .vob(s) I need.