What software is easiest for cutting dvds?

[yuppicide0138]

I've got a DVD. The guy who made it claims that DVD menus / separating the tv episodes cause too much troubles for people receiving them. So, he burns them as one long file instead. I need to cut out the episodes to make them as MKV of individual tv episodes.

If I open the video in Vidcoder it presents me with 2 titles. Total running time is over 2 hours. Luckily I've got dual 27" monitors.. so I opened the DVD on the other monitor and opened the first VOB file (there's 4) in MPC. I played the video and noted down the times I needed to record.

This is taking forever, because the first VOB has 1.5 episodes, etc. So I had to use a calculator to easily figure out the time. Episode one is :30 seconds up to 25:47 say, then episode 2 starts 26:07 and ends at 38:41 or whatever, which is only 12 minutes worth, the other 13 minutes is in the next VOB file.

Anyway, that's taking too long and getting confusing.

Any suggestions on what else to try?

[manono]

You can cut them into the individual episodes using MPEG2Cut2 and then turn the episodes into MKVs.

[nostalgia]

if there are chapter points at the beginning of each episode you can rip them using

https://www.videohelp.com/software/DVD-Decrypter

you can choose to rip each episode into a m2v and ac3 or vob's

[jagabo]

You can cut them into the individual episodes using MPEG2Cut2 and then turn the episodes into MKVs.

Yes, load the entire VOB set into Mpg2Cut2. Mark the start "[" and end "]" of an episode then select File -> Save This Clip As... to save that episode as an MPG file. It's usually pretty easy to find the start/end of episodes because you can see the opening and closing credits and you know how long the episodes are. Repeat for each episode. It shouldn't take you more than a minute or two for each.

[yuppicide0138]

If I use mpg2cut2, wouldn't ripping files into mpg first degrade the video quality?

[usually_quiet]

If I use mpg2cut2, wouldn't ripping files into mpg first degrade the video quality?

No. No re-encoding is done to during the conversion. The video and audio are merely moved into a different container.

[yuppicide0138]

If I use mpg2cut2, wouldn't ripping files into mpg first degrade the video quality?

No. No re-encoding is done to during the conversion. The video and audio are merely moved into a different container.

Got it! Thanks.

[yuppicide0138]

Is there any difference in quality using speed of Slow, Medium, Quick, or Max? It defaulted to quick which is about 4 minutes for one 25 minute episode for me.

[johns0]

yuppicide0138-In future posts please use a more descriptive title so other people can help you further,for this time i changed it.

[yuppicide0138]

I'm not only cutting DVD's. I am encoding them into MKV as well. But yes I will.

Anyway, this mpg2cut2 just crashed Windows 10. It said your PC ran into a problem, instantly restarted and checked itself.

The error came when I went to file and close all in mpg2cut2.

[yuppicide0138]

So I've cut all the DVD's and named them TV Show - S1E01 - Title, etc, etc.

What's the easiest way to change them to MKV now without re-encoding?

I'm not happy using Vidcoder at the moment because it's re-encoding and losing quality.

I tried DVDFab9 converter. It's quick, but it changed the resolution of my files.. cuts the heads off and other video. It was 352x480 originally. Not sure if that can be fixed.

I tried Freemake, but that's re-encoding also. Plus it's not free.. puts their branding on front of the video.

MakeMKV? Is there a way to name the files? It's calling everything Title00. I already went through the trouble of naming my files. I'd like to keep the names!

[jagabo]

MkvToolNix

[yuppicide0138]

MkvToolNix

I don't see that MKVToolNix will do the job... or at least I can't figure out how.

The only thing it seems to want to do is merge multiple MKV's into one file. I want to output them all as separate files with the same filename. Just don't want to do it one by one. Batch would be nice so I can queue it up and then go to the bathroom and come back and they're done.

[jagabo]

MKVToolNix: All you have to do is open an MPG file, and press Start Muxing (by default it saves with the same base name and an MKV extension). It only takes a few seconds per MPG file (depending on size, of course). Repeat for each MPG file. What's so hard about that? Do you have hundreds of files to convert? If so you can use a batch file and the CLI version to remux. MKVTookNix shows you the equivalent command line. It should be easy to convert that to a batch file.

[davejavu]

I use the following in a batch file changing the "*.mpg" depending of type of video file I am remuxing. Just make sure the path to mkvmerge is accurate, put the batch file into he same directly as the video files and run it.

for %%a in ("*.mpg") do ("C:\program files\mkvtoolnix\mkvmerge.exe" -o "%%~na.mkv" "%%a")

[davejavu]

Or if you want to get more complicated the following will set the language to English for each track, mark each track as the default track, disable header compression, disable track tags/stastics, disable chapters, ensure no subtitles are included within the MKV file and set the aspect ratio to 16/9. The aspect ratio will be needed if your DVD's were anamorphic widescreen as I have found this doesn't always get carried across automatically. This also assumes you only have 1 video and audio track for each MPG file and don't want any chapters or subtitles inside the MKV. I always use external SRT subtitles. I know you don't need to set the language for the video track but I don't like the 'und' undeclared tag that is applied by default.

for %%A in (*.mpg) do ("C:/Program Files/MKVToolNix\mkvmerge.exe" "--output" "%%~nA.mkv" "--no-track-tags" "--no-global-tags" "--no-chapters" "--no-subtitles" "--disable-track-statistics-tags" "--language" "0:eng" "--default-track" "0:yes" "--aspect-ratio" "0:16/9" "--compression" "0:none" "--language" "1:eng" "--default-track" "1:yes" "--compression" "1:none" "%%~A" "--track-order" "0:0,0:1")