caution with deletion with InstantCopy

[Fmazzanti]

Hello every1,

after fighting with InstantCopy for three days, I've come to stupid but important conclussions everyone may know right now, but that may be useful for others (I hope at leats).

I've tried InstantCopy with 'Lilo & Stich', PAL R2 spanish version. As all Walt Disney DVDs, it comes with *tons* of crap you have to swallow before you reach the main movie or the root menu. In this way, when you throw the DVD into the player, it goes through this sequence:

1- Language selection menu (this lets you choose the language of the
menus, not of the movie)
2- Legal warning note
3- Walt Disney DVD logo
4- Walt Disney advertaising: 'soon available on DVD and VHS'
a- Peter Pan fon't-remember-what trailer
b- 101 Dalmatas 2 trailer
c- some other trailers
5- Root Menu.

that means that items 1 to 4 are mandatory before you reach 5, the root Menu, where you can choose the movie, or the extras, or the
language/subtitles stuff etc.

The whole DVD takes 6.5Gb more or less, while the main movie is just
3.6Gb. That means that one can actually fit the movie on a DVD-R
without further compression and still have space left for some extras.
And that's what I tried with InstantCopy.

So I turned it on, selected the movie, selected one extra I found
interesting, and deselected all other things. Particulalrly, i could
deselect the 'soon available on DVD and VHS' part of step 4. I let the
stupid box wrking for a while, got my .pdi files, converted that to an
iso, burned it and tried it out. The result was... what the hell! A
broken DVD :( When inserted on my standalone, it goes through steps 1,
2 and 3, but when it comes to step 4, the player freezes. Why not?
After all, I completely deleted the trailers of step 4, so there could
be nothing there...
My conclussion: InstantCopy is a *wonderful* tool that cannot do
miracles after all. if you deselect parts of a DVD that are mandatory
in the main structure, then the resulting DVD it's not going to work
anymore. Maybe one could fix that with IfoEdit (who knows), but then
you loose somehow the beauty of the InstantCopy method, just one click and go.

In any case, I would certainly appreciate some input about this... any good way to strip mandatory trailers and still have a working DVD?

In the end, I decided to backup the whole DVD to avoid problems. I compressed their featurettes to the lowest size (30%) in order to have max room for the movie, which in the end got compressed to 80%. After burning and checking the image, I can say the movie is still *great* quality, while the extras are slightly worse. But still, I'm amazed about the quality of the main mavie after transcoding, and the quality of the extras considering now they tak 1/3 of their original size!

So the relevant final question is. what would you say it is 'acceptable' compression factor? What is 'good'? And what is 'excellent'?

Thanks...

[malum]

If the main movie is 3.6Gb just use Decrpyter and rip just the movie.

If you use it in file mode and demux the streams you can then reauthour it in IFOedit and be left with a DVD with no menu and just the main movie that will fit on one disc easily.

If you don't want to demux you can just rip the VOB's with the movie in using IFO mode do a get VTS sectors on the IFO and and burn the result

[Fmazzanti]

well yes, thanks... however I posted what I posted because I wanted to have not everything but not just the movie either, and because I was experimenting with InstantCopy.

[malum]

Sorry if you knew how to do it already using other tools

In any case, I would certainly appreciate some input about this... any good way to strip mandatory trailers and still have a working DVD

I was just answering this bit :)

[Scarpad]

Yes I think that the program was made to be able to reduce the size of the extras rather than deleting what you don't want. Probably with other tools you could manipulate things to accomodate this, but then yes you are defeating the 1 click purpose.

Most of the Movies I inserted even after compressing the extras to 30% across the board I tend to see the movies being compressed to between 45 and 65% whether this is a good enough percentage or not I'm not sure. In these cases I'll probably just use DVD2One, I'll use
Instantcopy for smaller movies under 4.36

[Fmazzanti]

Originally posted by malum
Sorry if you knew how to do it already using other tools
I was just answering this bit :)
Excuse me if my reply sounded a little bit tough, that was not my intention. Of course, any input was (and stillis) really appreciated:)

[int 21h]

You could just manually correct the IFO generated from InstantCopy... it sounds like all you would need to do in this case is change the pre commands of VIDEO_TS.ifo so that it just skips to the root menu instead of anything else... This of course would not correct any errors that may occur from navigating to something that doesn't exist from the menu... but it would make it playable :)

[MackemX]

I found this out with Monster's Inc and now if I want to strip extras, I will just use Ifoedit and the strip VOBid's feature that I don't want as this still maintains the structure and even the menu's are playable

so basically you would go and find out the VOBid's for the trailers etc you wanted to remove and then strip them but make sure the DVD works 1st, then use InstantCopy to do it's compression magic

bit more of a job but it results in a perfectly working DVD at the end of the day

I will use this until InstantCopy somehow fix this