Episodes?

[mcrispin]

Has anyone got any ideas about how to best rip DVD's that contain multiple titles?

That is; let's say you have SIX FEET UNDER, this is an episodic television series that has 3 to 4 episodes per disc (like the simpsons, or star trek, you name it), 42 doesn't support multiple titles (it will only compress the first), and OSeX and DVDBackup will make .vob's but I know of no solution towards compression.

Using the UNIX 'cat' command is a non-starter since it appears that mac's have nothing like IFOedit, therefore, no chance to alter the navigation packs... so what to do? Putting one episode per disc is just plain silly and expensive.

[schmeg]

This is a circumstance where Sizzle really, well, sizzles.

You have OSeX. Use that to rip ELEMENTARY STREAMS (.m2v and .ac3, not .vob) of the titles on your source disk -- that option is under the FMT button. Be sure to also choose CHAPTERS under the SEG (segment) button.

Choose the first title. Take a look at its chapters -- some titles are authored so that the very first or last chapter is only 15 seconds long or so. That's usually a snippet of script or something, and can be unchecked and ignored. You can also experiment with the other chapters -- maybe you'd prefer not to have the opening sequence of the show starting up every single episode.

Okay, so you have the first title selected, and it's set to rip to elementary streams, and it's going to break the title down into the individual chapter files. Let 'er rip.

[I prefer to break the file down into chapters, because Sizzle will create chapter stops automatically at each of those points. If you could care less about chapters stops, then feel free to rip as one big .m2v/.ac3 pair.]

The new Sizzle can now handle additional audio tracks, so if you have a director's commentary or whatnot, you can rip that as well.

So now that you have all those .m2v and .ac3 files, you can create new disks in Sizzle. I'll skip those instructions now, as it's fairly easy, but holler if you can't figure it out.

An advantage of ripping into individual chapters is that it allows you to pack as much info on a disk as possible. For example, many of my Masterpiece Theater-type shows (e.g., "I Claudius") come as many episodes on multiple disks. To back these up on the fewest number of disks, I follow the above procedure, and add as many chapters as will fit in the 4.3 GB limit. That might mean 1-1/2 episodes per disk.

If the opening titles and/or closing credits are self-contained as a chapter, I might remove them for all but the first and last episode.

Using the disk space most efficiently may mean spanning an episode over two disks, but if you're using the original chapter divisions, they are often set at an acceptable break in the action (whereas Disco, for example, splits the file whenever it hits its size limit, which could mean a split in the middle of dialogue).

Does all this make sense? OSeX + Sizzle = episode heaven. Good luck. Let us know if this works for you.

[mcrispin]

Thanks for the great advice, it worked great!

Here's an idea:

Since I'm a facist for keeping things on one disc, what if you had Sizzle deal with all of the chapters on all of the titles on the episode DVD then send the whole reconfigured thing over to something like dvd2one and have it compressed since now the whole thing should read as one title?

What do you think? Actually I am going to try this right now, I'll tell you what happens.

M

[mcrispin]

I tried what I described above, and instead of dvd2one, I thought I would try 42 (again), and got a 113 MB folder after having waited 14 hours. That is just nonsence.

[AntnyMD]

If you're going the DVD2one route, which I would recommend for DVDs such as Six Feet Under, et. al, use the latest DVD2one which has a Full Disk mode option. Since these sorts of DVDs can run upwards of 3+ hours, a Full Disk mode crunch will result in less than DVD quality, but its entirely acceptable quality for backing up your TV series DVDs 1:1.

If you need some tips or suggestions on getting DVD2one to behave in the Virtual PC environment, contact me offline.

[mcrispin]

Well, had some good luck recently with this whole episode thing.

A few notes and observations:

If you use the sizzle technique and then try to compress the disc via dvd2one, dvd2one will think the file hasn't been decrypted even though it has.

dvd2one also doesn't like VPC running winXP (which should surpise no one). It will look likes it's working then for some reason XP will restart itself.

Win98 seems to work best with dvd2one - especially the newest version. One note though: for the sake of organization, I like to share two folders for this process 1) VPC IN and 2) VPC out. Just as you need the VIDEO_TS folder for the incoming, you will need to create another folder (of any name) for the compressed disc, that is: have a set up something akin to Y:VPCDestination/MYMOVIE/, dvd2one doesn't understand "writing to the root" on a shared drive at all.

This of course means that you will have to compress in full disc mode, and for that matter the quality drop off isn't all that noticable, if you compare with the original you end up somewhere much better than a VCR - good enough for us simpletons.

Hope this has all been helpful!