I'm somewhat of a newbie with video/DVD's, etc., so I apologize if this is a dumb question.

I have a couple hundred DVD's that I have recorded myself on two stand-alone dvd recorders. One of the recorders is a Philips DVDR3576H (hard-drive based recorder) and the other is a Lite-On DD-A300GX. Many of them were recorded onto DVD+R media, with a small percentage on DVD+RW.

I'm working on copying all these over to a computer hard drive, and I run Linux (Freespire 2.0) on my home computer. I've been playing around with a number of tools in that environment (DVD::Rip, K9 Copy, Acidrip, mplayer, lsdvd, etc.). In every case, with every single one of these discs I've played around with using these tools, it reports two sets of titles where I expect only one.

For example, if a disc has three titles on it, these tools report six (actually 8, because with the initial three, there's always little tiny extra one with almost no data in it that I think is the "Empty Title" title that these stand-alone recorders always display on the title list: so instead of three initial ones, there's four, times two, so a three-title disc will show 8 titles). Its like double-vision: the second group of titles is always identical to the first group: so if title #2 is 1:35 in length, so will be #6 (in my example of a three-title disc). Title #3 will be identical to title #7, etc. All the titles seem to play just fine, and I've been able to do some ripping. But this second set of titles bugs me. What's going on here? Is this normal? Am I missing something if I rip one title but not its corresponding mate?

I have tried a few unencrypted DVD's that were produced commercially (this is all related to homeschooling curriculum, which is a market space where the producers aren't so worried about encryption, preventing piracy, etc. so many of even the commercially produced discs are not encrypted). None of these commercially produced discs exhibit this behavior. Only the ones I've recorded myself on my two recorders.

Any light shed on this appreciated.

Thanks.