From burned DVD back to authorable

[ellrick]

I make DVDs of my own material using Premiere 6.5, Adobe MPEG Encoder, and DVDit! LE (will be upgrading to PE soon, as a friend who has it but is not using it is sending me his). If I delete the M2V and WAV files off my hard disk after I burn my initial lot of DVDs, and later decide to use the same video/audio streams in a different combination or with a different menu, is there a way to get the files from the DVD (the VOB files, etc.) back to a form that DVDit can handle as input?

I tried reading the guide on IFOEdit, but it didn't seem to indicate whether it can create MPEG-2 files from the VOB data. The guide on Maestro included the process as Step 1 of re-authoring a DVD, but didn't describe how to do it (I suppose Maestro owners are already gurus, right? ;) ) - it mentioned using Subrip, but I couldn't find any docs for that. As for the forums, the DVD authoring ones don't talk about starting with a DVD, and the rest seem to only talk about re-burning purchased movies and don't mention using DVD authoring packages. So if this is a dumb question, I'm sorry, but I really did try to figure it out on my own first. Thank you for any help you can give.

[waldok]

Once your DVD is authored, you can still use DVDDecrypter to demux all streams from it.
Then you'll get the m2V (mpeg 2 video files) and all sudio files corresponding to the streams you have.

Have a look at DVDDecrypter.
You can also use the tool DoItFast4u, which will automate demuxing and generate all your demuxed streams at once.

Have fun.

Waldok:cool:

[ellrick]

Update: After I posted my question I kept digging on the site, and the guide for DVD Decrypter looked encouraging. So I downloaded it and tried it on a short stream on one of my DVDs. I selected the Demux option, and the resulting files seem to work. The M2V file was named {something-very-weird}.M2V, so that one was easy to figure out, but there was no .WAV file. There was, however, a .VOB file that was the right size to contain the audio, so I got bold and renamed it to .WAV. Voila - I was able to pull both files into DVDit.

Is this the easiest way (or one of the easiest ways) to do this? And are there any pitfalls to look out for, like when I try bigger files (this one was only 30 seconds, but some of my streams are over 45 minutes)? If the answers are yes (it's a good method) and no (no known problems), then I may have answered my own question, and the post will merely remain for some other confused soul. Time to reclaim my hard drive! :D

One more question, more specific to authoring software: I understand that DVDit! PE allowing storing of non-video files on the DVD along with video. Does that mean that when I upgrade to PE I will be able to store the DVDit project file on my master DVD (the copy I keep for myself) and be able to recreate the entire project from the data on the DVD itself (i.e. no need to keep any files on my hard disk unless I want to re-edit the streams themselves in Premiere)? Or am I missing something?

Addendum: Chuckle, chuckle - while I was writing that, you answered, and you receommended doing what I ended up trying anyway. Thanks for the prompt response, and for confirmation that I am on the right track.