Wasted Space

[drmih]

It seems that many people who have switched to DVD2One may lack the knowledge of those who use CCE, Scenarist etc, so I thought I would add a little knowledge that may be useful. DVD2One is obviously not in the same league as CCE but given the necessary space does a pretty good job. Therefore check out the dvd contents before starting to see if the company who has mastered the dvd have deliberately 'padded' the disc. In particular there are two things to look out for. The first is to include a vob-id in the VTS set that is not actually referenced by the movie. One instance of this is Monsters Inc R2 where there is a vob-id 1 which is not used. Not only does this take space but it also screws up dvd2avi or the like if you are using a more traditional re-encoding method. Therefore, for all of the major VTSs open up the ifo file with ifoEdit and check that all of the vob-ids are used (you can find the last by using vobrator to open the last file in the set). If there is a gap or one missing, strip it out.

More commonly nowadays are menu vobs that are far bigger than they need to be. I have found several occassions where either VIDEO_TS.VOB ot VTS_0*_0.VOB have 'blank' vob-ids at the end which have added 500 Mb + to the disc. The easiest thing to do is first to look at their sizes and determine if they 'look a bit big'. Next open them with dvd2avi and run them to see if there are long periods of just a black screen. If so note down the vob-ids and either strip them with ifoedit or selectively excluded the video stream with vobrator.

I hope that this is of help to some of you.

[dvd_maniac]

does all this mean that dvd2one does not strip out the padding? and such produce poorer quality then it could if the dvd did not have extra padding built into it...?

[mpucoder]

DVD2One allows you to select a PGC, and then follows it. So any padding or unrelated material is not considered or used in the transcoding process, and will not be present in the new files.
Also no menues are currently retained by DVD2One, so any bloat there does not affect the outcome.

[dvd_maniac]

Cool, I guess that means it will do the same with the next release when doing 1:1?

[drmih]

Sorry if it was a bit misleading but I was of course refering to the use of DVD2One in conjunction with MakeItEasy to make copies including menus and extras.

With respect to future versions that do 1:1 copies then unless they are wonderfully clever they will most certainly be affected by the bloated menu files as it is difficult, apart from eye, to identify 'black' sequences.