Merge two defective DVD's into a working one

[ET3D]

I have three copies of my wedding's raw materials, which wasn't that long ago, and already all of them have errors. One is completely unreadable, and on the other two there's a certain VOB file which has errors. I extracted it from both DVD's using CD Recovery Toolbox Free, and now I have two VOB files with visible errors. The good thing is that most frames look fine, and the two copies have different errors.

What I'd like to be able to do is merge the two videos into one file containing the best bits of both. I could probably do it manually in a video editor (I have Pinnacle Studio 10.8, which is crappy but might do the job), but that would be tedious and might not give me the control to create the best result. I'd like to know if there's any way to do this in a more automated way, or a less lossy way (i.e., not re-encode, just select which frame data to copy).

Thanks!

[lordsmurf]

Automated? No.

Less quality loss? Use Womble software, not Pinnacle. See these
- Womble MPEG-VCR and MPEG Video Wizard [DOWNLOADS]
- Editing with Womble MPEG Video Wizard [VIDEO GUIDE]

Also, the ISO Puzzle may have recovered more of the data. See this
- Recover Data From a Bad Disc [GUIDE]

Good luck!

[jagabo]

You could also try using Mpg2Cut2 (free) to extract all the good sections (without reencoding). Mark-in, mark-out, Save This Clip As, repeat... That will leave you with a bunch of MPG clips.

[ET3D]

lordsmurf, thank you so much for the ISO Puzzle link. It was able to get a perfect copy of that VOD in about 1% of the time it took CD Recovery Toolbox to save its defective version. I was simply amazed.