Unfinalized Panasonic DVD

[bigcat]

Hi, i think this might be useful for the owners of Panasonic DVD-RAM recorders, such as DMR-E100H. These recorders can write video on DVD-R, but to be viewable on other players or on a computer, those DVD-Rs must be finalized. That's what manual says. If you put unfinalized DVD-R into your DVD-RW drive, it won't be recognized or be shown as empty (0 b. empty, 0 b. capacity). But if you open Nero's disk information app or IsoBuster, you'll see data tracks. Their number and size look similar to a simple DVD-VR structure. All you have to do is to somehow create an image of a disk. Of course, its size must be almost equal to the size you see in Nero's disk info. If the size differs very much (more than 10%), you've lost several parts of your movie. If creating a disk copy doesn't work, try to open disk info and (in Nero 7) push "DVD-R options"->"Close VR disk". This will probably lead to an error, but after that you'll get more chances to copy your disk. Don't do it if you want to continue writing to this disk using Panasonic's DVD.
During the copy process you'll get errors like "unrecoverable read error" or smth. like that. Don't worry, everything is fine. If you copy with IsoBuster, DON'T try to copy small(<1Mb) data tracks - they don't contain video and they won't copy anyway.
If you're lucky, you'll get your *.iso or *.nrg or *.tao image. Now fearlessly open it with any player (eg. Media Player Classic) and watch the movie, if any. With TMPEGEnc or any demuxer you can demux this file to ordinary *.m2v and *.ac3. That's it. If you can't read your disk
with Nero no matter how hard you tried, maybe the problem is in your DVD-RW.
Yeah, don't forget to remux those video files, cuz they'll be corrupt.

[1amWendy]

I had unfinalized DVDs off of a Samsung. I was able to get an image of each using Isobuster. I extracted the files per Isobuster instructions. NOTE: the entire files did NOT display fully using Windows Media Player - never fear. It was all there (read on). The video portion shows up in the .vob files. I wanted to import the video into an editor, which (of course) did not recognize .vob format. However, using Prism software I translated the files from .vob to .avi. For some reason I needed to identify all the recovered files in Prism (even the .iso files), even though they did not translate. No matter... after all of that I was able to import the .avi files into my editing package perfectly - the full set.

Be prepared to spend hours dedicated to recovery.