Based on about a dozen previous 1 --> 2 split projects that came off pretty much without a hitch, I was rather impressed with DVDSTRIPPER. Especially for a free program. It is not a highly polished piece of work, like DVDSHRINK lets say, but it seemed to get the job done.

In case you haven't used it, DVDSTRIPPER is basically a simplified front end for IFOEDIT, and it calls DVD DECRYPTER for ripping and burning. It involves tending to a lot of selection details, but is a whole lot easier than trying to thrash out IFOEDIT directly. (I've been using the two guides you'll find links for in Viper10000's comments in the Tools section.)

But I recently hit the skids on a couple of DVD splits with it. Here are the errors, some of which got repeated several times:

"There's something wrong ! The IFO endsector does not match the file size."

"File position does not match the offset for Table ID _____"

"IfoEdit has generated errors and will be closed by Windows. You will need to restart the program. An error log is being created." (Fat lot of good this is ever going to do anyone. And if it is anything other than the log made by "Dr. Watson", I couldn't find it.)

"Runtime Error 70: Permission Denied."

In one of the two latest cases, both of the resulting disks were critically messed up. In the second instance, the first disk still turned out alright, but the second one was unplayable. The guides mentioned a possible danger of eliminating some item that might bring down the whole house of cards. So I played it rather conservative, and avoided leaving much in the way of gaps with deleted items. In the past, I generally let all of the stuff on the Menu side ride. The result would be certain menus that did nothing on one disk or the other, because the relevant content wasn't there, but otherwise no harm done. That didn't seem to work out this time.

I did see some comments in the Forums about IFOEDIT being buggy. I changed from .096 to the last .0971 version, but this made no difference. There were also some comments that the authoring of some DVDs -- or their structure -- would not make them suitable candidates for DVDSTRIPPER. Very possibly this is what I ran into.

It did seem rather curious to me, seeing successive error messages warning that IFOEDIT was being closed, and yet there it was, rising from the dead, still onscreen and continuing to run.

The developer of DVDSTRIPPER is or was a member here, and went on to create DVDREMAKE and DVDREMAKE PRO, if I have this right.

Maybe something is trying to tell me it's time to move on to DVDREMAKE, DVDREDO, DVDREBUILDER, or something like that . . . ?