MiniDVD-R not finalized?

[stantheman1976]

My wife is teaching a broadcast journalism class where they make news casts and all they have at the moment is a student's new DVD handycam. They brought me a 3" DVD-r with some footage on it because they couldn't get their school PC to recognize the disc. They took it to the media center at school and used the DVD/VCR combo there which read the disc and transferred it to VHS and asked me to transfer the tape to AVI but I refuse to do anything with that since it's going to be lesser quality now that it's been shrunk down. My PC sees a disc, but reads it as 0 bytes. I have no experience with these handycams, but my best guess is that the disc was not finalized.

So if it wasn't finalized is there anything I can do with the disc on my PC? Will any program read an unfinalized disc?

[muxx]

hi

we had a similar problem with a friend's mini-DVD camcorder.

we managed to extract most of the video on a GNU/Linux PC using conentional applications that read the disc sector by sector. I think it was cdrecord. could be just dd. if I remember correctly, you specify the start offset and length, dump the bitstream to a file and then process it using conventional tools. we used mplayer/mencoder.

the interleaved MPEG2 A/V data is written to the media sequentially, so there's no fragmentation. the PC cannot the see the filesystem, because the disc is not finalised, but you can still dump the data. you may end up losing the very beginning and end of a sequence/chapter.

so basically there's no rocket science, but it involves some experimentation in finding the beginning and dumping the stream. also, it could depend on a DVD drive. but as I say, it is doable.

we did it three years ago, but there might have appeared some user friendly windoze applications since then, I have no idea.

[stantheman1976]

Turns out that was the problem. The person who filmed it didn't know about finalizing and once they did that it worked fine.