DVD to MPEG Files without encoding?

[Methanoid]

Hi

I'm a fan of The Pretender and I've got a pile of DVD-Rs I authored on Gen 1 discs and some of my friends cannot read them so I was going to re-author for Gen 2 discs.

But, just to make life difficult I need to change the episodes on each disc (as my TV station showed some out of order and I missed a couple).

Can I extract the MPEGs from the DVDs and re-author without loss of quality (ie no re-encoding) ???

Any help gratefully received!

[jdobbs]

Sure, there are any of a number of tools that will demultiplex the audio/video out of the VOBs. You'll end up with a .M2V file and a .AC3 file (assuming the original was .AC3 of course).

You might want to look at DOOM9's VSTRIP guide as a starting point.

[Eyes`Only]

Smartripper also does this quite well (and 10-100 times faster than vstrip), and I've been working with the creator of DVDDecrypter, so that his next version of his excellent utility will have both pgc ripping as well as demuxing capabilities.

[jdobbs]

Good call... I forgot about that capability and hadn't used it in a while.

[Methanoid]

I tried Smartripper and got an M2V stream but no audio.... just a VOB file... is there no program smart enough to give me a MPEG2 file?

Also, is it possible to just rip the VOB for each episode and then create a menu that matches the VOB files?

[slk001]

Since your files are not copy protected, load them into TMPGenc and go to MPEG TOOLS then select SIMPLE DEMULTIPLEX. This will give you both the .M2V video and .MPA (or .AC3) audio files. Both can then be read by most authoring packages.

[Methanoid]

Thanks.. found that (didnt work very well) but also found a REALLY good tool XMuxer which will take a VOB, DeMux and ReMux and produce an MPEG file.

Small bonus is that if you've ripped your DVD (c) to HD and used some deCSS ripper then U can make a perfect MPEG2 file.