Fitting LOTR Extended Edition onto 1 DVDR

[Bigbucks1959]

I would like to make a single DVDR out of the extended edition of the lord of the rings. The movie is spread over 2 discs, how would i go about combining the video .m2v streams and audio .ac3 streams correctly to make one DVDR?

Thx for your help

PK

[john@sympatico.ca]

If you just want the film stream with no menus etc.. you could strip everything with IFOEdit and create 2 sets of VOBs (one set from each disk), and combine them with VOBEdit. When you have the master set of VOBs then you can begin the transcoding process to fit it on DVD-R

[Goldfinger_007]

have a look here: http://forum.doom9.org/showthread.php?s=&postid=215678#post215678

[roach76]

If you strip out everything but 1 audio and 1 subtitle stream(for elvish speaking scenes) you end up with 13 VOBs for both discs, which can be shrunk to 9 by deleting the last 2 cells in disc 2 which include ridiculously long credits for the official fan club. Then running each disc through IfoEdit to bring them down to 4 and 5 VOBs each (this is possible because each VOB is around 750-800MB due to stripping streams). Then join them with VobEdit. Create new Ifos for this with IfoEdit and you are now done (except for encoding etc.). Remember one thing though, with the PAL version (very likely to be similar with NTSC) each disc's English subtitles for the Elvish Speaking scenes have different Ids between the discs. So one will have to be remapped to be similar to the other. If you're only keeping one subtitle it is probably a good idea to map them both to 20 (PAL).

[petefol]

theres an extended version of the two towers?

[TRILIGHT]

Originally posted by petefol
theres an extended version of the two towers?

This was not in reference to "The Two Towers". If it was, the post would be closed. "TTT" is NOT released on DVD. It's still playing at the theater for god's sake!!

[petefol]

i was just wondering cause the title says "LOTR 2" i thought it meant lord of the rings 2.

[TRILIGHT]

I changed the title to avoid confusion.

[ChickenMan]

I simply converted each DVD to 1/2 a DVDR (using DVD2SVCD with CCE) and authored them in Maestro linking the end of last chapter to the start of the second movie (ie disk 2) Runs seamless.

If you rename the 2 disk VOB files to be continuous from the VOB set from Disk 1, then DVD2SVCD encodes them all fine in the one go except there is about a 1/2 sec audio jump (out of sync) at the join.

I also did not rip the last 2 chapters on disk2 as it contains about 35 min of scrolling LOTR Fan club members names. Not what I call an entertaining part of the movie. Doing so it ups the final bitrate from 2300 to about 2600 bps if I recall.

CM

[c0d3m0nk3y]

This was how I re-authored LOTR:FOTR SEE to fit on 1 DVD-R including Elvish subs only for Region 2.

I am sure there is prolly a quicker way but I got the result I wanted and learnt ALOT along the way. If you haven't already read most of the excellent guides here on Doom9 then you should - everything I use here was gleaned from the guides.

Stuff you will need:

DVD Decrypter 3.1.4.0
DVD Maestro 2.9 EDIT: No links or reference to downloads.
DVD2AVI 2.6
BitRate Viewer 1.5.054
ChapterXtractor
SubRip 1.14
CinemaCraft Encoder 2.5 EDIT: No links or reference to downloads.
IFOEdit 0.95
VirtualDub 1.51
AVISynth2

Caffeine and alot of patience....

OK - here we go:

VIDEO
-----

1) Use DVD Decrypter to rip the entirety of both discs in file mode.

2) Use IFOEdit (sweet app!) to strip out all the crap and leave you with a main movie, AC3 soundtrack and English subtitle stream. This is pretty much what you will work from for the rest of the caper....

3) Use DVD2AVI to get a .d2v project file for each movie. You can ditch the AC3 soundtrack that will be produced.

4) On region 2 the authors put some blank frames at the end of the video stream which have no corresponding audio. If you just paste the 2 discs together this causes the audio on the second disc to be ahead of the video by ~.75 seconds (guesstimation only).
To prevent this, these frames must be removed from the eventual video stream -- enter AVISynth2 and VirtualDub:
Create an .avs file for each movie containing the following:
LoadPlugin("X:\PathTo\MPEG2DEC.DLL") #NB/ AVISynth seems case-sensitive for the dll name on my machine - go figure?
MPEG2Source("X:\PathTo\PROJECT.D2V")
ReSampleAudio(44100)

You can then load the .avs into VirtualDub and you can view every single frame in the whole movie --- SWEET!

5) Find the start of the blank section at the end of the first disc and note the preceeding frame number - it should be 151945.

6) Use VirtualDub to decide where you want the second disc to end. If you wanna keep credits but drop the fan credits etc just find the frame number where you wanna stop and note it down. I used 147620 to keep end credits but drop fans.

7) Create a new .avs file which will frameserve for the transcoding process in CCE:
LoadPlugIn("X:\PathTo\MPEG2DEC.DLL")
disc1=MPEG2Source("X:\PathTo\disc1.d2v").Trim(0,151945)
disc2=MPEG2Source("X:\PathTo\disc2.d2v").Trim(0,147620)
unalignsplice(disc1, disc2)
resampleaudio(44100)

8) Use the RobshotA method in CCE to transcode the whole movie into 1 .m2v file.

AUDIO
-----

1) Rename the VOBs from disc2 to be continuous to disc1 i.e. 6 thru 10 and paste them into the disc1 dir

2) Use DVD2AVI to create an AC3 soundtrack - dont bother clipping it to near the end etc - it will be synced and trimmed during authoring - just get the full AC3 soundtrack in 1 file. You can delete the rest of the output from this operation.

SUBTITLES
---------

1) Load up SubRip and set the global settings option to only rip forced subs (nice feature that!)

2) Load the VOBS for the first movie and rip them according to the SubRip guide on the main site for DVDMaestro.

3) Do the same for the second movie but set the last timecode to 01:41:17.84 (the length of the trimmed first disc). This will create the correct timecodes for the .son file so you dont have to add it manually etc)

4) Rename all the BMP files for the subs for the second movie to be continuous to the first disc (disc 1 should be 1-16, disc 2 17-32) and copy them into the directory where you saved the first disc BMP files)

5) Copy the configuratoin lines from the second discs' .son file into the first discs' .son file amending the BMP filenames to match the renamed BMP for the second disc.

6) I then changed the line Contrast(15,0,15,15) to Contrast (15,0,15,0) - to make the subs appear all white during playback.

Chapters
--------

This is a ball-ache I'm afraid.

1) Use chapter xtractor on each disc and save to DVDMaestro format.

2) Add 01:41:17.84 to every chapter marker on the second disc - it sux but I would like to hear an easier way please!

3) Add the chapter markers from the second output file to the first.

OK - now you have chapters, video stream, AC3 audio stream and an elvish only subtitles resource - LET'S AUTHOR!

AUTHORING
---------

1) I used DVDMaestro obviously - which is quite easy to use and there is a guide on Doom9 also.

2) I imported the video and audio resources and constructed a DVD project according to the guide and then imported the subtitles.

3) After importing the subtitles if you find only 31 get imported make sure there is a carriage return after the last line of the .son file - this seems to cause the last subtitle not to get imported.

4) You now need to manually go thru the project timeline and check the forced sub checkbox in the properties of each subtitle to ensure that the sub is always displayed.

5) Compile and burn the sucker.... Enjoy Liv, uh ... I mean ... the movie! :D

I just re-read this guide and I guess it could be considered 'vague' in areas. I am happy to answer emails if it's a little grey from my feeble writing skills but if it's something you can find with 'search' please give it a shot first!

(email address is RIP - personal message me)

PS// If anyone out there can see any glaring dumbass stuff I did - lemme know cos I only wanna get better not complacent! >:)

[marvel2020]

I've done what you asking although i had to re-encode usiing CCE

Rip the first DVD using DVD decrypter, Used DVD2SVCD with it set up for DVD encoding and the birate set at....

8500 Max
4500 Average
2000 Min

Used CCE 2.50 set at 4 pass vbr and the Number of Cd's to use set at 1 with a the Size 2048.

Audio was set 384kbps 48khz

1 Subtitle = The Elvish Subs


The Second DVD was done with the same settings.

After all encoding and multiplexing was done, i used TMPEGnc to Edit the first Mpeg2 file to cut out the the little bit of black screen at the end of it, then Joined the 2 parts together using TMPEGnc using the (MPEG 2 PROGRAMME VBR) option.

When all was done the total size was just a shade under 4GB, used Spruceup to author the DVD and used Prassi to burn it.

Quality is excellent even on a 28 ince widescreen TV.