Remuxing DVD to MPEGs

[Booji Boy]

I have dozens of DVDs with recorded material that I want to losslessly remux to PC playable MPEG files.

The VIDEO_TS structure only contains one big VTS_01_?.VOB branch, but it includes most of the times 3 main movies. I'd like to have them as 3 seperate MPEG files. The movies also include subtitles which I'd like to remove.

There are lots of tools for editing DVDs but I have no clue which one 1.) serves my needs best (I'm talking about ~50 DVDs so the less I have to do in the program the better), it must be able to automagically split the VOBs into the two to three main movies, I don't want to do that manually, 2.) is really preserving the streams features the best and does not create transport streams that end up somehow with different headers, if you know what I mean.

It's really a lot I want to "backup" from DVD-Rs to harddisks and I don't want to start over half way through just because I noticed I had used the wrong tool or settings.

All the guides seem to focus on preparing DVD content for transcoding, but I want to transmux the MPEG2 video and AC3 audio only... if not into a MPEG container then at least some other natural format (.TS?) or maybe even the raw streams, doesn't really matter which one since my (Windows) PC can play all of them, I guess.

PS: Yes, I'm planning to transcode the videos later. But at the moment hard disk space is not an issue at all. I've got enough space to store the (raw) MPEG2/AC3 movies and my first priority is to get the movies off the DVD-Rs and out of the ISOs...

[linyx]

Try demuxing each title in PGCDemux then remuxing them with Imago Mpeg Muxer

[Booji Boy]

Alright, this tool (PGCDemux) looks good. Shall I divide by program chain or VOB IDs? They both give me the same lengths for the main movies. EDIT: well, doesn't seem to make a difference.

Imago MPEG Muxer works flawlessly as far as I can see. My DVD's audio has no delay so its missing delay correction isn't a problem.

I hope the MPEGs aren't botched in any way, they play well, and DGIndex shows me exactly the same info as it did for the DVDs.

[Adub]

The MPEGs should be fine. Imago has been tested for years. It can be a little finicky in what it allows you to select, but it's output is flawless.

[Booji Boy]

Thanks for the reassurance. Now I can get this project of mine going... :D

[setarip_old]

Hi!I have dozens of DVDs with recorded material that I want to losslessly remux to PC playable MPEG files.
The VIDEO_TS structure only contains one big VTS_01_?.VOB branch, but it includes most of the times 3 main movies.Your description of these DVDs is mystifying, regarding both form (One .VOB) and content (Three movies).

Surely, they're not commercial DVDs, are they?

[Booji Boy]

No, they're self-made and contain recorded TV programs (analog source even).

PS: Using PgcDemux and ImagoMPEG-Muxer works great, but after some DVDs it's getting tiresome to do the same clicks over and over again and I'm afraid that this routine may introduce human error.

Also it's a big of waste of valuable time (compared to the actual de/remuxing process) that I don't immediately notice it when a job gets finished. Conversion is so quick, you know, by the time I check back whether an intermediate step has finished the next step could have been finished as well: demux for one main movies takes about 2 minutes... but it takes me 5-15 minutes or even more depending on what I'm doing to check back. Same for remuxing. That at least triples the time needed, and I'm talking about 60 DVDs here.

Can anybody think of a script or batch job based approach? That would speed up the process a lot, since it will do the next step by itself unlike me who doesn't notice when a step has finished.

The manual steps I need to do are the following (those in bold should be become automated):

1. Rip a few DVD to ISOs.
2. Mount an ISO image.
3. Demux one main movie at a time.
4. Remux the raw m2v and ac3 files to MPEG.
5. Goto 3. if the last main movie wasn't converted yet.
6. Unmount and delete the ISO.
7. Goto 2. until I need to rip more DVDs, in that case goto 1.

3. to 5. have to be done that way, because I don't want to rename the raw streams in PgcDemux every time in order to allow multiple sets of raw files in the same folder. So I rather only demux and remux one main movie at a time and let PgcDemux overwrite the files that have the default file names, in order to limit the manual input in those two programs to a minimum.

[manono]

You can save some time by using VOB2MPG:

http://www.videohelp.com/tools/VOB2MPG

[Booji Boy]

Hm, nah too bad it doesn't work in my case. It doesn't split off the PGCs of the VOB set into seperate MPEGs... my DVDs only have one video title set including all main movies:

2003-05-12 17:26 <DIR> .
2003-05-12 17:26 <DIR> ..
2003-05-12 17:26 12,288 VIDEO_TS.IFO
2003-05-12 17:26 55,296 VIDEO_TS.VOB
2003-05-12 17:26 12,288 VIDEO_TS.BUP
2003-05-12 17:26 96,256 VTS_01_0.IFO
2003-05-12 17:26 112,640 VTS_01_0.VOB
2003-05-12 17:26 1,073,739,776 VTS_01_1.VOB
2003-05-12 17:26 1,073,739,776 VTS_01_2.VOB
2003-05-12 17:26 1,073,739,776 VTS_01_3.VOB
2003-05-12 17:26 1,073,739,776 VTS_01_4.VOB
2003-05-12 17:26 385,492,992 VTS_01_5.VOB
2003-05-12 17:26 96,256 VTS_01_0.BUP

[setarip_old]

1. Rip a few DVD to ISOs.
2. Mount an ISO image.
3. Demux one main movie at a time.
4. Remux the raw m2v and ac3 files to MPEG.
5. Goto 3. if the last main movie wasn't converted yet.
6. Unmount and delete the ISO.
7. Goto 2. until I need to rip more DVDs, in that case goto 1.If, as you've stated, you're desirous of minimizing human intervention for this activity, why are you bothering to creat and then mount .ISOs (and then later unmount and delete them) It would be simpler to just "rip" your DVDs to hard drive as DVD "packages" (.IFOs, .BUPs, and .VOBs)?

[manono]

Either that or use DVDDecrypter in IFO Mode and get each PGC as a single VOB file. Then do with as you wish to each VOB. Since these things are unencrypted, you can do the same using PGCDemux on the DVD in the DVD-ROM. Just check the "Create A PGC VOB" box.

I agree that creating ISOs is a silly waste of time.

[Booji Boy]

Since some of the DVD-Rs have deteriorated already (that's the reason why I'm doing this in the first place), I have to use a program called h2cdimage (http://www.heise.de/ct/05/16/links/078.shtml) which let's me re-rip a damaged CD/DVD multiple times until all sectors have been read successfully. Luckily so far I've managed to get all damaged DVDs ripped, but I had to use different drives on some DVDs.

Yes, I've used a ripper before (DVDFab) on the VIDEO_TS folder in order to create "new" DVD folders for each movie, but I dismissed this approach because I've found it to be too work intensive and thus unproductive. But I think I should go back to using a ripper on the mounted ISOs again. DVD Decrypter can cut out each PGC, splitting the VOBs "by PGCs" when ripping the mounted ISO in IFO mode, I should have tried this good old tool right away. It even plays a notification sound and comes to the foreground if one PGC is finished, and the VOBs are not split at 1GB, which is both perfect. DVDFab did the 1GB split in order to create a compliant DVD structure, and that was actually the main reason why it was useless to me for my backup project. Also DVDFab and PGCDemux seem to be quite slow compared to DVD Decrypter when it comes to the data transfer rate.

But apparently there seems to be no way to get the two main steps, cutting out the PGCs from the single VOB set and then remuxing the raw streams/VOBs to MPEGs in one go. But at least dumping PGCDemux in favor of DVD Decrypter is speeding the whole thing up, it doesn't matter that I get VOBs out of it, in fact that enables me to use a whole different set of tools on them. Therefore I will settle with the VOBs created by DVD Decrypter for the time being, if I'm going to transcode them in the future anyway it's no use to remux them into MPEGs. I can even play the VOBs directly using DirectShow, so I can safely drop this extra step, speeding up my process tremendously.

Thanks to you all.