VOB limit for DVD-Shrink???

[AlecWest]

Recently, the Internet Moving Image Archive (archive.org) added "Radar Men From The Moon," a 12-part serial, to their list of downloadable public domain films. I downloaded all 12 parts and, as an experiment, decided to burn on copy on 2 DVDs (6 parts per DVD) and another copy on 1 DVD (all parts). Since the total program time was under 3 hours, I was wanting to see if a 1 DVD version would look OK.

I used DVDauthorGUI to create 3 directories:

1) RADAR_MEN1 (parts 1-6)
2) RADAR_MEN2 (parts 7-12)
3) RADAR_MEN (all 12 parts)

All seemed to work well. But, while DVDshrink was able to create ISO files on the RADAR_MEN1 and RADAR_MEN2 files, it was unable to even load up all the VOB files for the 12-part version ... saying it encountered an error with VOB file #9.

I figured there must have been some unseen error with that file and deleted the directory ... using DVDauthorGUI to reauthor the 12-part version again. And again, it was successful. But ... again ... DVDshrink said it encountered an error with VOB file #9.

Has anyone else encountered such an error ... or knows of some kind of VOB "limit" for DVDshrink?

[Baldrick]

Can you list all vob,ifo,bup files?

[guns1inger]

There is a limit to the number of VOBs in a titleset. 9 rings a bell.

[Baldrick]

Max 10 vobs in a titleset, 0-9. You must make a new titleset(or called track in tmpgenc dvd author), you can have 99 titlesets.

[bugster]

from https://www.videohelp.com/dvd

Up to 99(1-99) titles with max 10(0-9) VOB files each

If DVD DVDauthorGUI puts each movie in its own VOB, you will have 12 VOBS, but 1 titleset. If that is the case, you need to author using multiple-title sets, or use another authoring program that handles multiple source files differntly.

[liquid217]

I added up the parts and it looks like it is appx 10226Meg, which means it would probably need more than 10 vobs (each vob being 1 gig), esp if you have a menu. I agree with bugster that you should make these titles into their own titleset. You could do that by editing the XML with dvdauthorgui, or you can use borax's gui for dvdauthor

[AlecWest]

Thanks to everyone here. I did as you suggested and edited the XML file in DVDauthorGUI to create 2 titlesets, 6 episodes in each. I still had one problem but not insurmountable. While DVDauthorGUI created the 2 titlesets and while DVDshrink accepted the result, DVDshrink (3.2) only allows so much shrinkage. When it had shrunk things to the max, I was still about 100 megs over the size limit for a single-layer DVD. So, I used DVDshrink to create a new directory with files shrunk to the max ... and then, used DVDshrink again to shrink the result one more time. This was after trying, without success, to get it to accept a "custom" shrink percentage below the max allowed with "automatic" compression.

To see how much degradation there was, I burned the DVD from the reshrunk files ... then, I burned another DVD with only the first 6 chapters (original/minimal shrinkage). I watched the first chapter on each DVD and, frankly, they both looked identical. And (grin), I made it a point to sit close to the TV screen to catch any nuances. If there was any degradation, it wasn't very apparent. So, my single-DVD experiment was a success.

FWIW, the original MPEG files downloaded from Archive.org were encoded at a video bitrate of 7800 and an MP2 audio rate of 224/48. Considering the results I got, I suspect their encoding was a bit of "overkill."

In any case, I won't argue with success. Again, thanks to all.

P.S. I'd never worked with XML files before. But, while the codes were unfamiliar to me, the coding structure was both easy and intuitive. It didn't take long to figure things out. Just goes to show that you can teach an old dog new tricks, hehe.

[AlecWest]

P.S. BTW, people using DVDauthorGUI do not have to demux the MPEG files since they all have NAV packets. Just add the MPEG files themselves to the title screen and off it goes.