Importing Different Audio Streams and Subtitles when Reauthoring a DVD

[nesguy]

Hey guys, it's been a very long time since I've done any video editing on my computer. I've finally found a project that I want to spend my time on, and so I'm asking for your help.

Here's what I'm trying to do:

I'm ripping subtitles and audio off a DVD, and I want to pair them up with the video ripped off a different DVD. Then I want to encode and author the DVD to play on a standalone player (preferably with selectable audio and subs).

My reason for doing this is I own some R1 and R2 DVD's of the same series, and the R2's have excellent video quality compared to the R1's, but the R1's have great audio and english subtitles that are lacking on the R2 DVD's.

I want to make my own DVD's that combine the best of both worlds, I guess. I'm fairly certain I can figure out all the ripping and recording of the video/audio, but after doing a search on the forums, I couldn't figure out what filetype I need to encode the subs in, or exactly what program would be best for it. I plan on using subrip to get the subtitles I need, but I'm not sure what to do with them after that.

I was planning on using the DVD2DVD program to rip the video from the R2 DVD's, but I just wanted to check with you guys to make sure I'm not losing any video quality with that particular program. It wouldn't make much sense for me to create my own DVD's with subpar video quality after buying the nicely remastered DVD's from R2.

Last random question. Can I rip an R2 DVD with my DVD-RW set to R1? Or do I need to buy a 2nd DVD-ROM drive and leave that one set in the R2?

Thanks for any help you guys can throw at me.

[warrenc@greatsoft.co.za]

Hey! I'll answer the second question. Things like DVDDecrypter ( Part of RipIt4Me ) crack the CSS protection and bypass the zone number. I do however recommend you set the player to the zone you use the most.

As for the other idea - Now that is going to be time consuming and no guarentee whatsover that it will actually work properly.

Consider Zone 1 is NTSC 29.97 fps.
Zone 2 is PAL 25 fps.

You would have to basically reencode the video at the new format to be able to mux it together. PAL->NTSC NTSC->PAL

This isn't that hard but can be time consuming.

Really sit and think about if you really want to do this because as I said it is time-consuming and you will need to learn a lot about MPEG-2 encoding and DVD-Authoring.

Read some more here in the forum's and take some time out to read about the tools.