Q About Instancopy and (near) 100% Quality Episodics

[strugs]

OK - I JUST got IC7. I have been to MrBass, searched this forum, but can't find an answer to my Question. Here is my plan:

Rip disc (Sopranos), deselect episode 3 & 4 (leave 1 & 2). Burn.
Rip disc (Sopranos), deselect episode 1 & 2 (leave 3 & 4). Burn.

Would this give me a perfect 1:1 backup of this disc (on two discs of course)?

[strugs]

Oops - I forgot to mention that my goal is to keep the default menus.

[Vejita-sama]

You seem to be asking two questions at once. The answer to the question that you are asking (as worded) is clearly No. It's not a 1:1 backup if you had to remove/process/edit/crop part of the original source disc.

I think you mean to ask will there be any difference in quaility between the source and my backup if I follow this process?

Well as written (if your run IC) yes. IC will re-encode the video and that will result in a lost in quaility (although it might be to small to see).

However, I think what you are trying to say is that you want to:

1) Rip DVD to HD
2) Delete the VOB IDs containing eps 3-4
3) Burn new VIDEO_TS folder with only eps 1-2 (assuming is smaller than 4.7GB)

In which case, yes, the source DVD and the DVDR backup will have the exact same quaility.

The question is how do you do this. IC is not the best choice to do this. I would recommend either DVD Shrink (esp for the Sopranos, replace the movies with still images) or IFOEdit.

Althought the reg hack for IC allows it to strip out titlesets it doesn't really work that well. And the Sopranos DVDs are authored with seemless branching which will only confuse IC more

Both DVDShrink and IFOedit are freeware and can be found at http://www.doom9.org

[MackemX]

@strugs
If all 4 episodes on are on one DVD and nothing much else aprt from menus, then I very much doubt it will try to reduce the size so it should maintain the original quality

as for the 1:1 backup, there are two ways you can interpret this when someone mentions it

1:1 quality
1:1 content, the more commonly used

the way I interprete your thread is that it looks like you are talking about quality as you just want 2 episodes on each DVD by removing 2 which obviously is not a 1:1 content backup

using IC is one of the simplest options but if you try to play the episodes removed then it will probably freeze the player, but pressing menu normally takes you back to the menu (small price to pay if you want simplicity)

there are other methods , some mentioned above but it all depends on the original DVD structure and exactly what you wanna do

[strugs]

Yes, I would like to have 1:1 quality. I don't care how many discs it takes.

So, IC is not ideal, many suggest DVDshrink, but I would like to keep menus and the one DVD I tried with DVD shrink lopped off the menus.

Is there a way to use DVDshrink and keep menus. I know there is a check box for keeping the menus in DVDshrink, but it says they will not function...

Thanks for the help so far.

[scottvf]

You can use TMPGEnc DVD Author to create your own menu and do only 2 ep per disk after you rip it.

[Vejita-sama]

Yes you can use DVD shrink and keep the menus. There's an excellent guide at www.doom9.org:

http://www.doom9.org/mpg/dvdshrink-main.htm

You have to choose 're-enocde' (NOT re-author which strips everything but the main movie). At the bottom of the guide it ask what you want to do. Click on the ' keep everything on the DVD' choose.

Basically what you do is select everything you want to keep and set the video to 'no compression.' For everything you want to erase/strip set the video to 'still image' and just delete the audio and subtitle streams.

This will keep the original menus, and if you choose something that is now a still image there is 'something' to be displayed.

Again you could do this with IFOEdit, however some DVD players have problems when you select a deleted VOB ID from the main menu (either locks up or stops playing, my DVD players just kind of 'flashs' and returns to the main menu).

[MackemX]

try IC and remove the Titles (should only take 20-30 mins)

then burn on a RW and see what happens

does each episode have its own set of VOB's or are they all in one big Titleset?

[vance43211]

use ifoedit and use the split to 2 disc option is probaly your easiest option

[strugs]

SUCESS!

Thanks to all that helped. Here is what I did:

Decrypted with DVD Decryptor in File Mode.

Ran DVDShrink 2.0 - opened the IFO created in previous step.

DVDShrink showed the main movie was split into 4 titles. Each title represents the episodes (4 episodes on disc 1). DVD Decryptor also showed there were 4 VOB files, but they did not correspond to episodes. One of the VOB's was one episode plus the last 1/4 of another episode.

Selected Title 3 & 4 and set the streams to "still pictures" and de-selected all audio for both episodes. Made sure that titles 1 & 2 were set to "no compression". I also had to deselect the Spanish language audio streams for some episodes so that the remaining files fit on one DVD-R.

Ran the "backup" function in DVDShrink - saved files into a directory named "VIDEO_TS".

Opened Nero, burned a UDF/ISO disc.

All menus and the episodes set to no compression work perfectly, and if you select an episode that has been set to "still pictures", you get a slide show (1 frame per second) of the episode (it is therefore unwatchable, but this prevents any errors when trying to play on a standalone player).

Thanks to all that helped point me in the right direction.