Merge 2-Disc (DVD) Movie

[Trismegistus]

Hello all,

I've been backing up my DVD collection and putting it on my NAS to stream through my bluray player, and the encoding is working fine. I'm using x264 CRF 18 or 20 and just muxing the studio audio. The problem I'm having at the moment is that some of my longer movies are 2 disc sets. I know DVDfab can merge them, but I prefer freeware or manual tools. It would be easiest is someone could point me to software or a guide which will help me to combine the two "titles."

My ripping process:

Except where it won't get past copy-protection, I use the ripit4me frontend to rip movie only (in other cases slysoft)
decrypt the dvd and if necessary clean up vobs, then I send it through DVD shrink to output without compression and without 1gb file splitting.

I suppose I could just encode separately and join with mkvmerge, is this the best way to do it? I use staxrip to encode, so I can cut out extra frames if there's added padding.

I'm just wondering if anyone out there has general advice on this; any suggestions are welcome. I'm pretty knowledgeable as far as DVD ripping goes, been doing it for about 7 or 8 years, but I know there are people around here who know a lot more than me. Thanks for your help

[Trismegistus]

darnit i dont know how i ended up in this subforum, I guess I clicked the wrong one. sorry XD

[MindController]

You can try DVDRemake. They have a free version you can try, but to unlock all the features you have to buy the full version. Still my software of choice for manually combining and joining DVDs.

[Trismegistus]

thanks for the quick reply, I haven't tried that one yet, but I'll take a look.

[manono]

Put both discs on the hard drive, renumber the second part of the movie to follow the first so that all the VOBs are numbered consecutively, and then move them into the same folder. Take it from there.

Although you can try it. DVDRemake Pro won't do you any good as it'll create separate VTS's within a new DVD, rather than joining the two parts into a single title/VTS as you want. After it's done the parts will still be separate, even if within the same DVD. Here's the guide:

http://www.dimadsoft.com/dvdremakepro/ht_merge_full.php

[hech54]

DVDShrink will join them the same way DVDRemake does......and NO you don't need to "shrink" them.