Rip seems ok but playback doesn't work? What am I missing?

[TRILIGHT]

Ok, I completed the rip using the Smartripper 2.41 software. I used the "backup" option since I would like to later burn this to DVD. Though the rip process seemed fine, I cannot play it back using the Ravisent CineMaster 2000 DVD Player on my system. Usually, I am able to open a VOB file with this player and playback is fine.

I've tried opening an IFO file. The message I get (though I DID select "region free" during the rip) when I try to open the IFO is a screen that says "This player is incompatible with the region marking of this disc". If I try to open a VOB file, I get all of the audio but a black screen. No video is displayed. Does anyone know what is going wrong here? Thanks!

[TRILIGHT]

Does no one have this problem? Shouldn't I be able to play the ripped files? If they do not play from the hard drive then how can I expect them to play if burned to a DVDR? I do not want to purchase a DVDR drive until I know this works. Has anyone seen this same anomaly? Thanks!

[Cheeky Wee]

Have you tried to rip the disk using the normal methods, not the backup option?

Have you tried anything like DVD Genie or Region selector to see if there is some kind of problem with the DVD region coding within windows?

Just a suggestion. Not really sure what is going on with your problem.

[Digifreak]

I have occasional vobs from smartripper that do not play on powerdvd. I have gone ahead and encoded them anyway with DVD2AVI and TMPGEnc and everything was fine. Never burned the non-functional vobs however.

[TRILIGHT]

Thanks for the info! I will check the region selectors but there are some things that bother me about that...

1) If I have selected "Region Free" then shouldn't this not be a problem at all?

2) If I have to use a workaround to play the VOB files on the computer system, what good will it do me to burn the faulty VOB files to DVDR? I would assume that I would not be able to play them back on a regular DVD player which is ultimately what I would like to do.

Basically, all of my experimenting is going towards whether or not I am going to shell out the money for a DVDR or not. If I can back up my movies, then great. If I can't though, there isn't much point in me getting a DVDR since I don't do any "home movie" stuff.

Does anyone have any experience with making an entire DVD to DVDR copy? Is what I am seeing normal? I feel almost positive that I should be able to play back the VOB files without any problems while they are still on the hard drive. Am I wrong?

[Digifreak]

One thing to keep in mind on your decision is that commercial DVDs are 9.4G dual layer discs while DVD-Rs are single layer 4.7G meaning you wont be able to produce "exact" copies for most discs. In fact you wont even to be able to fit some movies even if you burn only the movie with no menus or extras.

[Cheeky Wee]

Yip, you are correct with the region free stuff but Windows is so flaky on occasions that it is worth having a go with DVD Genie!

Have you tried DVD Decryptor? I prefer this for ripping the movie to harddisk and then you could use ifoedit to make it region free.

Digifreak makes a valid observation but there are workarounds (aren't there always!). You would use ifoedit and ReMPEG.

ReMpeg is a transcoder program that can reduce the size of your movie files so that they fit on one DVD-5 disk. I have seen reports of people reducing the "quality" by 50%, with the associated reduction in VOB size, and still being happy with the results on a 37" TV screen. Pretty good. Only one problem, it takes ages to transcode the movie ... aaah just like the old days of Flask and bbmeg I've just used ReMPEG to reduce American Beauty at 90% quality setting. Big question ... is there a difference - hell I can't tell which is which :P It took 8 hours on a pretty high end machine

You can also use Ifoedit to split the movie across 2 DVD-5s. Works with most but there are exceptions where the movie makers have already split movies across 2 DVD's e.g. Pearl Harbour R1.

I'm currently starting to play with this process but have found some problems with the latest version of ifoedit 0.9. Have reported the problems to the developer, hopefully will receive a reply soon.

Only some suggestions. Hope they are of some help.

[TRILIGHT]

Thanks everyone for the great info! I finally got it corrected using the IFOEdit program. What confuses me though is why the rippers did not make it "region free" when they were supposed to. I tried both SmartRipper and DVDdecrypt and both had options to make it "region free". However, this did not actually happen. I had to use IFOedit to do this. Once I used IFOedit on the ripped VIDEO_TS.IFO file, I was able to play everything back from the hard drive without any problems! Thanks for the prompt replies and advice everyone! I'm new to the technology but I'm sure I'll catch up and have more to contribute to the forum in the future. I hope this problem/solution helped someone else. Does anyone happen to know why it would not have been made "region free" during the rip process? Thanks again!