Old sony dvdr

[atlantic965]

Some years ago I had a SONY DVD-R 580P I think it was. I recorded many programs direct on DVD, When Sony died DVDs would not play on any other DVD player. I just found out to my delight I can watch them on NERO Movie viewer. I tried burning a copy of the old Sony made DVDs using NERO so I can watch on any DVD player again but NERO DVD Copies cannot read the old made with Sony DVDR. Is it possible to make new DVDs playable on any tv? or somehow rip the content off the old Sony made DVDs

[DB83]

If you look at the files on one of the disks I suspect the largest one is named ????.vro

That means you recorded the programs in video-recording (VR)-mode rather than the more compatable video-mode

I also know to my own cost since I did the self-same thing with my first dvd-recorder.

It is possible to extract the contents of the .vro file to standard mpeg2 from which you can then author a standard dvd-disk. I know the older versions of Nero could do this and if the Nero Player can read the disk there might well be a program with your version of Nero to do so.

Failing that, there has been much discussion about this over the years so a forum search for 'dvd-vr' might help

[atlantic965]

When you open the DVD with file explorer it shows NOTHING but the NERO Movie Player sees something because it will play the video content of the DVD

[october262]

you might try something like dvdfab and see if it can copy the discs.

[usually_quiet]

When you open the DVD with file explorer it shows NOTHING but the NERO Movie Player sees something because it will play the video content of the DVD

Maybe the DVDs are not finalized. If that is true, it may still be possible to recover the video.

ISOBuster's paid version might be able to recover the video for you by itself with less effort on your part, but perform steps one and 2 below using the free version before buying it to find out if ISOBuster can detect anything on the disc. If ISOBuster's free version can't detect anything on the disk, neither will ISOBuster's paid version.

The recovery method below using the free version of ISOBuster, plus Mpg2Cut2 (free) or Womble MPEG-VCR (a $19 MPEG-2 editor) worked for me. There may be other editors that can be used if you want to experiment.

1. Open ISOBuster
2. Select DVD drive (If you can see "Track 01" in the left-hand pane, it can recover at least some of your data)
3. Open Options menu
4. Select "Image File"
5. Select "ISO/BIN/TAO" Tab
6. Uncheck both boxes
7. Close dialog window
8. Right click on "Track 01" in the left-hand pane
9. Select "Extract Track 01"
10. Select "Extract User Data (*.tao, *.iso, *.wav)"
11. Choose where you want to save the data. (It will copy everything it can find as one big .tao file, which is a type of disc image)
12. Rename the .tao file to .VOB.
13. Open Mpg2Cut2 or MPEG-VCR and drag the VOB file to it. Click through any error messages.
14. Edit the VOB file to separate into individual videos as clips. If you want a DVD, re-author the clips into a new DVD using DVD authoring software. AVStoDVD is easy to use if you only need a basic menu.

There may or may not be other "Track" files containing video. If there are, you'd recover them the same way.

[johnmeyer]

Nero can finalize as well, and the OP already has Nero.

[usually_quiet]

Nero can finalize as well, and the OP already has Nero.

That is why I didn't recommend software which finalizes discs. ISOBuster is specialized data recovery software for optical media.

[Edit]It is better to try data recovery before attempting finalization than afterwards. If finalization fails, the chance to recover the video may be lost. Nero must write to the DVD to finalize it, and there is a chance that the pre-existing file system will become unusable.

[usually_quiet]

Double post