Problem creating MiniDVD

[doomed@ripping]

Hey there,

I have a query & I would be glad if someone could please give me an overview of how exactly do I go about this.

Mini-Dvd
I came across Nero 6 & it has an option for creating a MiniDvD under Photo & Video. What I want to do is make a backup of a movie from a DVD onto CD's. The DVD in question has 3 movies on it. NTSC/29fps/R1 The movie I want to backup has two vob files of 1gb and 723mb. Single Audio & Subtitle Stream. I don't mind if the resulting movie needs to be on 3 cd's because I'm quite used to changing VCD's on my DVD player :)

Basically what I am looking at is making a backup onto CD-R's. Dont mind if the Menu is sacrificed but it would be nice to keep it. Don't have no extras. I have been through the guides section and tried working with Ifoedit but haven't had much luck with it, I read another guide about this elsewhere (on another site) but it never worked.

As my post is proof I am a newbie and trying to figure this out. Can someone please point out how do I go about doing this? I can get around this step and make a DivX for the movie but then can't play it on my DVD player & don't want to lose quality converting to SVCD or VCD.

[killingspree]

hi and welcome to the forum,
here's (http://www.doom9.org/mpg/minidvd_guide.htm) doom9's guide to miniDVDs - it should contain all info you need, BUT you have to be carefull, it is one of the 'advanced guides' meaning that it expects a basic level of knownledge from you!

plus the guide is more than a year old, so there have definitely been quite a few things changing since then!

hth
steVe
PS: personally i wouldn't know if miniDVD is ideal for your purpose. if you want high quality for your PC, go for divx/xvid, if you want standalone compatibility, just go for SVCD, unless you have a large plasma TV you won't notice much difference!

[doomed@ripping]

Thank you for your help Stefan.

I have been unable to find out how to cut a vob down to the size of a cd-r and then make it run on my dvd player. I tried Ifoedit and it has a feature for splitting but the resulting vob's were unplayable even on my software DvD player like PowerDvd. I can successfully make DivX for my pc and SVCD for my DVD player but the quality does suffer in the case of SVCD. Call me obstinate but I can't get my sleep while i'm trying to figure this out :)

I have found the Doom9 guides an excellent source for helping me along but I seem to have hit a wall in the area of creating a Mini-DVD. As you mentioned correctly the guides do seem old and most of the software is not available and what is available is not doing the job for me.

[killingspree]

hi again,
see it's not as easy as splitting vobs and burning them to CD. a valid miniDVD needs (like a normal DVD) a valid structure so that the standalone player can play your miniDVD like it was a normal DVD (with a couple of CD changes in between)

now honestly the interest in miniDVD has decreased rapidly over the last year or so as DVD burners have become more and more affordable. also there was never this much interest in it so tools like GordianKnot or DVD2SVCD did not emerge for this kind of DVD backup! if you look at very old guides for SVCD or divx creation, they look pretty much like the miniDVD guide, they have just evolved in the last couple of years!

now what you need is a program that creates a valid DVD structure for every vob segment of your movie so that you can just create an iso and then burn it to CD. unfortunately i do not know of the existance of this tool (which does not necessarily mean it does not exist).

hth
steVe
PS: have you tried simply feeding the vobs to nero in miniDVd mode? perhaps it works, although i expect that it requires you to also provide the ifos (and bups)

[oddyseus]

well, doomed@ripping, u have engaged your self in a difficult situation. Let me explain some things that this venture demands.

First of all not all standalones r capable of minidvd playback. In fact only the cheap taiwanian ones r. As an example I can say, cause I own one, Affrey and the rest of Sampo clones r able to playback miniDVD. I can provide this link (www.area450.xo.uk) that deals with these players.

Second, u must build a valid dvd structure, by means of a authoring program such as Maestro, Scenarist, dvdlab and the rest. Since all of these r meant for real dvd authoring they r splitting the files at 1gb. Dreamweaver with the patch applied addressed the problem but in a messy way, imho.

Usually I made 3 cds minidvd. I used mpeg1 at 352x576 for the video and used the original audio. I reauthored first the menus, simplifiying them the most, re-encoding their videos also in order to get their final size.

Then, I used chapter x-tractor to obtain the chapters of the dvd and the calculator that the guide uses to calculate the bitrate needed in order to fill acd and cut at a chapter point.

My pc at the time was a PII-233 so I couldn't use CCE and I aimed for panasonic plug-in for flask. My researched showed that mpeg1 at 2mbs is much nicer than mpeg2 at the same bitrate.

I used flask to cut the video at the predicided points during encoding so at the end I had 3 videos and the resulting audio that flask provided also.

As an authoring tool I used Maestro.

Hope this was a bit helpful. I ll be here if u need additional info.

[doomed@ripping]

Hey thanks guys for your help. I am going the SVCD for my DVD player and DivX for my pc for the time being since the Mini-DvD option seems all but undoable @ the moment and I really have run out of patience. I did run into a guide on a website which helped me along and using IFoedit I was able to cut vob's down to less than 700 mb chunks and then burn them to cd's and now they work on my PC but alas not on my standalone. My standalone reads the disc and displays the video but after a few seconds of playback just stops with a loud noise (kinda similar to when it gets stuck on a scratched dvd) I tried this with quite a few movies but all seem to give the same result.

A quick question, I don't seem to understand this. I am using TMPGenc Plus 2.5 for DivX to SVCD conversions, the SVCD created can only be at the 480x480 res whereas I believe 480x480 & 480x576 is possible with a standard SVCD. Is there a way to enable this option in TMPGenc so that it uses 480x576? Why is the default resolution 480x480 when the usual aspect ratios are 4:3 or 16:9 etc but never is it hor:ver. Due to this pixellation appears on the video when stretched to fit the screen. I am using the correct settings in TMPGenc to get the desired aspect ratio at the time of encoding but this stretching is giving me grief.

Thanks,

Anshu from India

[oddyseus]

480x480 is svcd NTSC resolution whereas 480x576 is PAL. Obviously the film u r encoding is an NTSC one.