Ghost VOB's? (9.4GB DVD+RW?)

[VideoBeginner]

After recording onto a DVD+RW for the first few times, I looked at the list of files, and among the others, I saw two sets of VOB files:

VTS_01_1.VOB ........... VTS_02_1.VOB
VTS_01_2.VOB ........... VTS_02_2.VOB
VTS_01_3.VOB ........... VTS_02_3.VOB
VTS_01_4.VOB ........... VTS_02_4.VOB
VTS_01_5.VOB ........... VTS_02_5.VOB

Later I saw that both sets had recorded the same thing. So my next thought was "Well THAT is a big waste of space! Why record everything twice?"

Soon after that, I selected all of one set of VOB files and it totaled nearly 4.6GB. Knowing the DVD capacity was only 4.7GB, I was confused how the second set of VOB files were there. I selected all of the files in the folder and it totaled nearly 9.2GB, but any other way of looking at the disc indicates that it is only 4.7 GB max.

What is going on here? How (and why) would the second set of VOB files be both there and not there?

Later, I did a quick disk format, and from thne on only one set of VOBs have been showing.

[VideoBeginner]

Sorry for the bump since this isn't critical, but I'm still very curious.

Has no one ever seen this themselves?

[joseph5]

Was the DVD recorded with a standalone recorder? My LiteOn LVW-5005 does the same thing. I don't remember how they do it, but the second set of files doesn't really exist.

[DarkZell666]

Last time I saw something like this, it was on a Windows 2K install CD. The CD was less than 650MB, but the whole data on it was reported as being over 1GB. It looks like one of the file sets consists in hardlinks to the files of the other set (for those who don't know about them, it's 2 different "files" pointing to the same physical data). I know NTFS allows it, as well as ext2 & ext3 on unix, but I wouldn't swear CDFS has this capability.

[VideoBeginner]

Oops, I forgot to check this topic for new posts!

joseph5, yes. It's a typical DVD/VHS recorder. Nothing too fancy about it.

DarkZell666, that makes sense. It does not make sense why it would be done, but that's another story.

Two days ago I did the initial format on a different brand of DVD thinking maybe the DVD itself had something to do with it, but I got the same results.

[foxyshadis]

I'd guess that it's just a firmware bug that writes out a bad file table, two entries for every actual file. Firmwares are weird like that. Have you contacted the manufacturer to see if they have any updates for it?

[joseph5]

Standalone DVD recorders write discs with an editable DVD+VR (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DVD_plus_VR) format, and I believe the double files is a "feature" of this format, and I doubt it's a bug.

[VideoBeginner]

foxyshadis, no I haven't, but I never considered that I would need to. If this event was causing the disk to actually write twice only allowing half of the space to be used then I would, but so far I have found no harm in this. As I stated above though, all I have to do is format the disk a second time and it fixes this "bug" resulting in only one table being seen from then on. It was all just a curiousity.