splitting or cutting VOBs at arbitrary points

[harry349]

Hello all,

I'm fairly new to the DVD authoring world, I have just recently copied my first movie successfully.

My next goal is to re-master the DVD my wife and I had made of our wedding. There are two main problems with it:

1. The morons who made it made it a 2 hour DVD even though there was only 1:06 or so of video for our wedding, so the last 54 minutes is someone else's wedding reception.

2. The chapter points are just at evenly spaced points and not at meaningful chapter points.

I think I can get the chapter points, but because of both items above, I want to split the VOBs at a completely arbitrarily. Unfortunately the cut I want to make is not at a chapter point or I could do it easily with IfoEdit and the split to 2 DVDs feature.

*** BOTTOM LINE ***

I want to take the existing VOBs and keep just the first 1:06:35, or 119730 frames, for example, and throw out everything else, leaving it in a truncated set of VOBs without having to re-encode.

Any suggestions? I've looked at vobsplit and vobedit, with mostly confusion thus far. Any help is greatly appreciated, thanks!

[Matthew]

vobsplit will only cut at certain points, not on any frame. But it's better than nothing. Only used it once but it did the job.

Another possibility is to demux using smartripper, then use tmpgenc to cut the extracted video stream. The output will have an incorrect header so then demultiplex in tmpgenc to get your video stream.

Then re-author using DVDMaestro (easy to use and powerful), putting chapter points where you want them.

I just tried the video thing on a small sample and it seemed to work okay - maestro accepted it (although I did use a re-encoded mpv I had lying around, not a extracted stream).

edit: tried this method on an extracted (non-re-encoded) stream and it worked just as well :)

Just had a thought...underflow errors could be an issue (not sure) so it might be an idea to use bbmpeg to cut (set mux rate to 0). You'll need to specify an audio stream though (which will be disgarded when you demultiplex with tmpgenc).

[harry349]

I'm pretty sure I could handle splitting it arbitrarily if I had to re-encode it, but my goal is to avoid that. Does anyone have any ideas for this without re-encoding? Thanks.

[Matthew]

What I just suggested doesn't require re-encoding...

Another possibility is to extract the video stream using smartripper, then reauthor in maestro but set the last chapter such that you can use the ifoedit split to 2 DVD-Rs method after compiling...

[harry349]

Matthew -

Sorry, perhaps I misunderstood your first post, but the second one makes perfect sense. While it's not quite what I had in mind, if no splitting tools offer that functionality, I'll give it a try! Thanks for your input!