DVD2one spiffy episodical joins

[Slomer]

I had 3 dvds of an anime series (hellsing) and wanted to put all 3:30 hours onto one dvd. I was figuring I could do this the long way (manually) or I could try to see if I could trick dvd2one into it.

1. I used dvddecrypter and in options set file mode to join vobs. I then ripped all 3 dvds (JUST the main movie to save time and space).
2. I took disc 2 and named it as the second file in the vts set and disc 3 and named it as the third file in the vts set and put them all in the same directory.
3. I used dvd2one try and convert them. It created 12 vobs!!! Since the ifo said the movie set was smaller than a dvd it did not compress the vobs, it just converted the entire set into one big friggin set. This set did not function as the ifo structure was all wacky.
4. I used ifoedit to create ifos and set to 1 pgc and add chapter for all cells. voila.. a HUGE working dvd movie set with 12 vobs and 48 chapters!
5. Redid dvd2one on it and it did correctly compress this time. Somehow though it messed up the ifo structure again even though the ifoedit structure worked before using dvd2one.. :P
6. Pull out the magic ifoedit and once again created a new ifo set for the vobs with the same settings.
7. Copied subtitle colors and edited language settings for the streams with ifoedit.
8. Get VTS sector just to be sure.. though it was not really needed.
9. Burn with record now max..
Voila.. 3 dvd's worth of anime episodes on one dvd and in near original quality with all tracks, subtitles, and chapters intact.


Some things to note:
a. I think if you just use ifoedit on the 3 vob set originally you could skip one of the dvd2one steps.. will try this when I do outlaw star dvds. dvd2one is so fast I didn't really mind though since it didn't compress the first time, just rebuilt the movie.
b. This is great for episodical stuff like south park or anime or combining a flipper. I am not sure how practical it is to have multiple movies without a menu to select form though.
c. I am hoping to discover a way to trick dvd2one's prediction with just the ifos until he releases a version with adjustable image aims. When I loaded the original 3 renamed fake vobset into dvd2one it read the timecode form the single disc ifo as the total movie length. At first I believed the timecode for the first disc's ifo in pgc1 threw dvd2one's prediction off and that was why it made a 12 gig vob set and did not decide to transcode it. I figured that perhaps it's prediction is based off of that timecode. So I edited the 12 vob set's ifo to have a timecode an hour and a half longer than the actual movie (after I figured out the dvd standard for the damn thing including framrate.. which is easier said than done). I was thinking that dvd2one would then pick this up and encode the set to 2 gig or so thinking it would need the extra space for the other hour and a half that did not exist so to speak. dvd2one did indeed pick it up as a 5 hour movie, and it MAJORLY effected the converting time.. almost doubled it. Also took forever to finally compile the ifos and when it had, it corrected my altered time back to the actual running time. It looks like dvd2one either uses this for prediciton but checks it's work and reencodes if it winds up having a lot of spare space.. or perhaps uses this AND something else in the structure to predict. PGC space, last chaper, cell times, etc. There is definately something else here. I wish I could figure it out. I hate to pad the vobs to make it 1:1 and I am impatient with releases. Wish someone who knew more than me could help figure this out.
d. It would be fairly easy to pad the vobs a little using this method and then using vobedit, etc. remove the padded part off or stuff with audip you can remove later.. thus leaving room for a simple authored menu. I think derrow (you da man!) is releasing something that autostuffs/cuts specifically for this reason and evn automates the ifo updating.
e. The dvd looks great on a 32" t.v.
f. I rarely spell check... if there is a typo in this crap ignore it.
g. dvd2one is awesome and so is ifoedit.. Envy the skillz of these guys and impatiently wait to see what they surprise us with next.

[Slomer]

Hmm... I take it back. Not everything went perfect. While the dvd plays great if I go to the chapters AFTER the end of the original dvd end and then rewind it rewinds immediately to the end of the first disc.. WTF?! going from chapter 35 to chapter 15 in 2 seconds with rewind is silly. Anyone have any ideas on how to fix this? Does this in standalone and software. One of those things you don't notice until too late. Also fast forward in software (but not standalone) seems to do this. It's as if the chapters from chapter 16 through chapter 43 have a timetable or whatever as if the darn thing was only like 5 seconds long. The really weird thing is chapters 44-48 are fine.. :P

[Slomer]

Come on, SOMEONE must have some idea how to fix this seak issue. I am putting effort into finding ways to easily do good quality multi-dvd joins, full movie rips, etc. but I am far from knowing everything. Anyone have an idea what the problem is atleast so I can try and find the answer myself?

[ezekiel999]

Sorry I haven't been able to respond to your question sooner Slomer but this forum requires new users to wait 3 days before being able to post. Now on to the good stuff.

I recently purchased a dvd-burner (Pioneer dvr-a05) and have been reading and ripping everything trying to figure out how things work (quite different than vcds and svcds). Like you I have been trying to take multiple dvds and join them to one dvd-r using dvd2one as the final process.

I was able to join and burn tne 'lates' LOTR release to dvd-r and it plays flawlessly on my pc and stand alone player. I created the VOB files using IFOedit which I also used to create the new IFO files. Four VOB files contained the main movie.

Well I decided to try and combine both discs of Fellowship of the Ring - Extended Version to one dvd-r and ran into a similar problem. After ripping and joining the VOB files and creating new IFO files using IFOedit the blasted movie would cease to play and skip to the end at the 50th chapter (50/57). No matter how many times I messed with IFOedit (GET VTS Sectors, Fix Nav Points, etc.) and VOBedit I could n't get it to work. The last VOB file (which contained the last 7 chapters) worked fine if I opened it with WinDVD but not if the entire movie was played with it.

Well what I figured out was that the IFO structure of the dvd only allows for 10 vob files. Well my 10th vob file wasn't being recognized since when you create your new IFO files with IFOedit, VTS_1_0.VOB is created (menu file) in essence making my 10th VOB file the 11th VOB file unreadable (skips through it).

So I needed to get those 10 vob files down to 9 vob files and I really didn't want to reencode using REMpeg or TMpeg to a lower bitrate (we all know those take forever and a day). I also tried running each dvd disk through dvd2one and then joining the results and combining them and running them through dv2one again. The video was really decent except for the dark scenes and the scene with the balrog. Those scenes had quite a bit of blockiness and I'm a perfectionist so they were not suitable for me.

It dawned on me to just join the 9th and 10th vob files manually into one larger vob file (2 gigs as opposed to 1 gig) and hope that the IFO header file would allow the vob file to be read. I joined the files using the copy command and it worked! I was able to watch the entire movie (all 57 chapters) flawlessly and I was able to compress the movie to 4.36 GB with dvd2one.

I had tried to make the size of the VOB files larger (2 gigs) when I was using VOBedit to join the two disc's vob files together but VOBedit kept splitting the vob files into 2kb increments (not sure if the custom size isn't implemented in VOBedit yet or if I wasn't putting in the variables correctly).

I do apologize if this is a bit incoherent but I'm a bit tired and wanted to get this out to help you along.

Questions?

Ezekiel

p.s. I am in the process of making a guide this type of situation

[Seir Cram]

...
It dawned on me to just join the 9th and 10th vob files manually into one larger vob file (2 gigs as opposed to 1 gig) and hope that the IFO header file would allow the vob file to be read. I joined the files using the copy command and it worked! I was able to watch the entire movie (all 57 chapters) flawlessly and I was able to compress the movie to 4.36 GB with dvd2one.

I had tried to make the size of the VOB files larger (2 gigs) when I was using VOBedit to join the two disc's vob files together but VOBedit kept splitting the vob files into 2kb increments (not sure if the custom size isn't implemented in VOBedit yet or if I wasn't putting in the variables correctly).
...
Questions?

1) So just to confirm, after you manually joined the last two vob files, you did NOT run ifoedit again? Just burned to DVD?

2) Also, remember that there is a max. file size limitation for ALL versions of windows running the FAT/FAT32 file system. For single files >2+Gigs you have to have a NTFS file system partition under NT (e.g., XP, W2K).

SC

[ezekiel999]

I had already run IFOedit before I manually joined the last two files. I was trying to figure out if there was a way to fool the IFO file into playing the last vob file by joining it and it worked. I didn't run IFOedit after I joined the file since I was able to play the entire movie just fine. I'm not sure if I ran IFOedit again there would be problems but I would suspect there might be.

Again after mergining the files I think my total size of all vob files (1-9) was near 10gigs. I then ran them through dvd2one which I would have to imagine writes new IFO files since the total vob count went from 9 down to 5.

And yes I'm aware there is a max file size limit on fat32 systems. But for those of you who have more than 9 vob files it appears that this way will work to reduce the number of vob files without having to reencode them. Ofcourse it is not reducing the actual size of the files just the number of them (size reduction ala dvd2one).

Ezekiel

[Supreme2k]

I found that the best method is to use derrow's tutorial for Ifoedit.

Download the guide here (just over 4M): http://www.incase.de/files/IfoEdit-guides.zip

You will also need VobEdit: http://mpucoder.kewlhair.com/Derrow/Vobedit06.zip

I first used this method for Goodfellas, and it worked perfectly. I have since used it to put four Pokemon discs on one disc.

[rgardjr]

From another post:
https://www.videohelp.com/forum/viewtopic.php?t=142368

Gazorgan pointed out that you can change the default vob rips size from 1 gig to larger to end up with fewer vobs

"10 VOB limit is for DVD9's, and if you think about it it makes sense(4 1 GB VOB's and 1 short VOB is all a 4.7 GB disk can hold, not counting a bunch of little VOB's).

So what to do? VOB's don't have to be 1 GB, hint hint. Rip them as 2 GB, or 1 VOB/Disk like I do ( aint NTFS grand? )"

This would take care of the problem (the 9 vob limit) during the original rip stage. Hope someone will find this useful.

[suerpflysocal]

when i try to combine 2 disc wedding video to one, this the prob I have:
i have the movie but the timecodes are off, as if there were 2 independent movie, where the 2nd disc started the timecode changed to 0:00:00