merging two (or more) DVD titles

[bobbibo]

Please give advice on the following problem.
After ripping a DVD having several titles with DVDSHRINK, I wish to merge these tiles into just one title (selecting common subtitles and common audio tracks).
I have done what is a suggested elsewhere: remove all IFO and BUPs, keeping only VOBs, then running IFOEDIT (latest version) over the first VOB with "create IFOs" and "create 1 PGC".
IFOedit reads all vobs, but as a result creates an IFO/BUP for only the first title.
This happens systematically, whatever the original DVD.
So something is wrong! But what? (I have also tried to renumber the VOB file names, in sequence, to no avail)

[blutach]

You need to join the VOBs first with VOBEdit (not IfoEdit) then create the IFOs.

Look at the guides (both of them) on this page (http://www.ifoedit.com/joinclip.html).

Note - the attributes need to be the same in both titlesets (video, audio and subs).

Also, if you have DVD2One, this can be done in one click.

Regards

[bobbibo]

Yeah, thanks!
Done as you suggest. result is playable (with VLC), but DVDshrink does not find it at all (even after renaming result folder to VIDEO_TS).
(I used IFOEDIT, making one PGC, one chapter per cell)
Trying to write ISO image from IFOEDIT finds (and does) corrections needed to the IFOs, after which the result is not playble any more.
Gonna try DVD2one.
Regards.

[Ghitulescu]

(I used IFOEDIT, making one PGC, one chapter per cell)
Trying to write ISO image from IFOEDIT finds (and does) corrections needed to the IFOs, after which the result is not playble any more.
It should work! Are you sure you used exactly the same steps? And payed attention to the same attributes: same video type, same audio types and order (same ID for the corresponding track), same subtitles type and order (same ID for the corresponding track)?
You need to join the VOBs first with VOBEdit (not IfoEdit) then create the IFOs.
Note - the attributes need to be the same in both titlesets (video, audio and subs).

[bobbibo]

Thanks, and yeah, I made sure all was OK in terms of title attributes.
And even DVD2one didn't accept the task, when using the "join multiple movie titles" button. However, by looking at its contents screen, after opening the iso file containing the 3 titles ripped by DVDshrink from a standard DVD, I observed that the whole thing was listed (left-hand panel) as one title, containing (right-hand panel) 3 titles!
I concluded that riping several titles in ONE DVDSHRINK run does not actually "separate" these titles.
Running DVDSHRINK once for each title, thus producing 3 iso fiels, solved the problem.
By the way, this was also the case when running DVD2one against the original DVD: it saw the DVD as one title with 3 unseparable containing titles!
In other words, you have to rip each title separately, before merging them with DVD2one.

The question is: why is this?

[Ghitulescu]

3 different VOBids in one PGC, but without detailed info (pictures) of IfoEdit/DS this is only a guess.

[r0lZ]

Shrink groups the titles together when at least one cell is common to the titles.

On some DVDs, the same content is referenced several times. For example on multi-story DVD, most cells of the movie are common to all titles, but some are different, for example if the movie is presented in the theater and director cut versions on the same DVD. Several titles can also be grouped in the case of a compilation of short films, with an additional "Play All" title. If you want to rip the whole content, it may be handy to have it grouped as one "pseudo" title in Shrink. But you can turn that feature off if you wish.

Sometimes, there is only a small cell at the end of each title that is common to all titles. In that case, you can rip each title individually without duplicating the real content.

Anyway, be careful, as with your method, there is a risk to include several times the same material in the joined VOBs! You can examine the VOB/Cell IDs included in each title with PgcEdit, to verify if some cells with real video content are duplicated.

[bobbibo]

Good advice is priceless.