There has to be better way!!! (About DVD Maestro)

[.:HAMMER:.]

Hi all!

I pretty new to all this dvd authoring stuff, so please be gentle

A few days ago I started to author DVDs using DVD Maestro - and this being the first authoring program I ever tried, it's not an easy task.
However, I'm slowly getting to know the basics!!

I just seem to have encountered some major problems. Let me explain what happened earlier today when I decided to re-author a DVD!

I demuxed a VOB set to a m2v and an ac3 stream. But whenever I imported the m2v into Maestro, Maestro wouldn't import the whole video file. It only imported like 2 seconds of the file. I checked if media player would play the video correctly and it did. Total running time is somewhere around 1:42:30. So I decided to check the file in SmartRipper and I realised that the first chapter had two cells - and the first cell had a running time of 2 seconds. I extracted the first cell to check it out (it was only a black video sequence). So I thought to myself that I could just leave this one out and I would be back on track. I then started SmartRipper and extracted the whole program chain except cell 1 in chapter 1 - using stream processing and "demux to extra file". I imported the newly extracted m2v file in DVD Maestro. Now Maestro imported about an hour of the video. Better but still not the whole video. Back to SmartRipper and yes two cells in a chapter around 1h playing time. This time around I decided not to do the same misstake (it's rather tedious having to go back and forth between programs) and I checked all the chapters. I found one more chapter that had two cells. Now I had two chapters each containing two cells (not counting chapter 1). I then decided that the solution to my problem would be to split the video in 3 parts.

1st part: "Chapter 1 cell 2" to "Chapter 12 cell 1"
2nd part: "Chapter 12 cell 2" to "Chapter 17 cell 1"
3rd part: "Chapter 17 cell 2" to "Chapter 22"

When this was done I imported the 3 parts into Maestro - and each part reported the correct running time. Then I joined the 3 parts into one big video file and imported the joined video in Maestro. But Maestro then again reported a wrong running time (1h in total).

It is not the end of the world if I have to keep the movie split in 3 parts - but it makes tasks like adding subtitles and chaters more difficult than it already is (plus I don't know if having the main title split in 3 parts will mess something up) I'm wondering what I'm doing wrong - because I'm obviously most be doing something wrong.

One more thing. Why is time offset incorrect when adding a video clip. This is a real pain in the a#¤% when you have to add subtitles - cauz you have to manually correct this in the .son file.

Please somebody help me

Thanks!
.:H@MMER:.

[Faustus]

Its how your aquireing the video thats likely causing the problem.

However I think this MAY be a better question in the DVD 2 DVDR forum.