How to place chapters from multiple DVDs onto one?

[pcm]

I'm trying to create my own demo DVD to test DVD players/display
devices. When I read mags, I see they'll mention viewing a specific
chapter from some DVD to look for how well the device performs. I'd
like to do the same thing, but rather than bring 10 DVDs to a store,
I'd like to have one DVD with just the desired chapters.

I took several DVDs that I owned and used DVD decryptor to rip
specific chapters onto my HDD (each DVD in it's own folder).

How do I (easily :^) join this into one DVD that I can burn?
Ideally, I'd like to have each chapter accessible in the final
DVD (so I can nav to chapters). Can anyone point me to tools
that can do this? I'm hoping there are free tools, as I only
plan on doing this once in a while (when I find new chapters
to add to the disk).

I'm new to doing this and am lost by all the various tools that
are available.

Thanks!

[jel]

hi pcm and welcome to the forums.
well it all depends on how you define 'easy' :sly: .
from limited testing i would say that dvd lab would be an excellent place to start. it is avaliable (here) (http://www.mediachance.com/dvdlab/) and comes with a free 30 day trial. there is even a tutorial showing you how to create a menu for accessing your scenes.
good luck with the project and let us know how you go
j

[Kedirekin]

If you don't need a menu (i.e. you don't mind skipping through the chapters/titles), you can do this easily in DVDShrink using reauthor mode.

You do have to rip all the original DVDs to your hard drive first, but once they're all present it's easy.

Alternatively you can build up your compilation piece by piece. Create a DVDShrink project with the chapter from the first DVD. Then open that project and the next DVD in Shrink to get a project with two chapters. Repeat.

I'm not sure which way would be easier.

[pcm]

Thanks guys. I'll look at both DVDShrink and DVDLab and see what's
up. I don't need to have menus, I just want to be able to advance
forward and backward through the chapters.

On a related note, I have the Roxio 6 products that came with my
recorder. Can I use the DVDBuilder from that? Are there any possible
issues with that tool for what I want to do? How about ULead's
VideoStudio and MovieFactory (two other tools that I have, but
haven't played with too much)?

[pcm]

Kedrikin wrote:

> You do have to rip all the original DVDs to your hard drive first, but once they're all present it's easy.

Do I need to rip the entire DVD, or can I use DVDDecryptor to only rip the chapters I want?


> Alternatively you can build up your compilation piece by piece. Create a DVDShrink project with the chapter from the first DVD. Then open that project and the next DVD in Shrink to get a project with two chapters. Repeat.

I have ripped individual chapters from the various DVDs. When I run DVDShrink I can open one, but if I try to open a second, it overwrites the first. If I open a second copy of DVDShrink and try to drag and drop the first to the second, it still replaces it. Each file has a single Title, named "title 1". Am I missing something?

Also, if I preview the clip, I don't hear any audio. Is that expected?

Thanks for your guidance...

[jel]

kedirekin may know more about this than me but here goes...

try renaming your individual titles to something different ie title 1, title 2, title 3 etc that way they wont (hopefully) over write each other when you add them.
there are some guides at ddloopings site that might give you more of an understanding of how to use dvdshrink. click (here) (http://www.dvdshrink.info/guides.php) for the guides page.
also not hearing audio on the preview menu is perfectly normal.
as for the other programs you mentioned....sorry but i havent used them much my self
hope that helps
j

[Kedirekin]

I'm not familiar with any of the other software titles you mention either.

Up till now I'd never done reauthor from multiple DVDs before, but I've seen many posts here that it is possible. In fact, I just did a quick test and it worked fine.

I started with two fully ripped ISO mounted via daemon tools.

I opened the first DVD in DVDShrink, clicked the reauthor button and dragged a title over to the reauthor window.

Then I opened the second DVD in the first DVDShrink window (not the reauthor window). I dragged a title from that DVD to the same reauthor window under the title from the first DVD.

I then pressed the Backup button in the reauthor window. Viola!

To get just the chapters you want, you'll probably have to click the start/end button and isolate the chapter from each title.

I honestly don't know if you can rip just the chapter and then run Shrink against it. I always do backups from mounted ISOs. However, you should certainly give it a try. If it doesn't work, a piece by piece approach should get you nearly the same funcionality - Shrinking just the chapter from each DVD, which should go fairly quickly.

[pcm]

Hmm. I renamed the files to VFS_01_0.IFO and VFS_01_1.VOB for the
first DVD, 02_0 and 02_1 for the second one.

When I opened the first IFO file in DVDShrink, it shows a main movie
of Title 1 and Title 2-19 of extras. I click on re-author and then
selected to open the next DVD. It shows one Title, numbered Title 1,
even though I renamed the IFO and VOB files.

Any pointers as to what I'm doing wrong?

[Kedirekin]

I'm not sure what jel meant about renaming titles. The titles are just numbered inside the VIDEO_TS.IFO, and I don't seen any way to rename them in DVDShrink. Renaming the titleset files (VTS_02_1.VOB) will not rename (or renumber) the titles inside those files.

I'm pretty sure it doesn't cause a problem in any case. For example, you can drag title 3 to the reauthor window 3 times, and set different start and end points for each instance. A lot of people do exactly that to set different compression levels for the main movie versus the end credits. If having title 3 multiple times from one DVD is no problem, I wouldn't expect having two title 1's from different DVDs would be a problem either.

[jel]

hmmmm....i also tried kedirekins' approach and it worked for me as well. form what i understand dvdshrink requires you to have the full dvd 'disk' accessable at all times in the process.
now this can either be the actual physical drive in your computer (if you have multiple drives even better:) ) or the contents of the dvd ripped to your hard drive in file mode or in iso mode and mounted with daemon tools (as a virtual drive)
so....
depending on your setup and avaliable hard drive space you may be limited to the number of dvd titles you wish to make a compilation from.
hope that helps
j
ps yeh sorry about that renaming thing .... brain is still in morning 'barely function mode' :o

[Kedirekin]

Actually, I think a piece by piece approach is pretty much unlimited.

Here's what I'm thinking.

Put DVD # 1 in your drive. Start DVDShrink, click Open Disk and select the DVD drive. Click reauthor, drag over a title and set start/stop if appropriate. Click Backup in the reauthor window and backup to a directory on your HD. Close DVDShrink.

Now put DVD #2 in your drive. Start DVDShrink, Click the Open Files button and select the VIDEO_TS.IFO from the prior backup. Click reauthor and drag over the title(s). Go back to the master DVDShrink window (not the reauthor window), click Open Disk and select the DVD drive. Drag a title from DVD # 2 over to the reauthor window and set start/stop if appropriate. Click Backup in the reauthor window and backup to another directory on your HD. Close DVDShrink.

Put the next DVD in to your drive. Repeat.

[pcm]

I'll give that a try tonight. Thanks for clearing up the numbering
question as I was wondering why it wasn't working.

I've got to work now :^( I'll post a response tonight.

[farmer dan]

Hi and welcome. I like situations like yours--they're challenging. I think that I am thinking along the same lines as Kedirekin. However, I have not used DVD Shrink that extensively. From the posts here I am not sure whether you have your "chapters" on the hard drive or not. A chapter to me is a "short" clip. For the sake of argument, let's say that they're 1-4 minutes long.

Therefore, as I see what you want to do, you want to take, say, 10 movies and extract 1 chapter from each movie and then combine those ten "chapters," clips, into one DVD.

I'm going to operate on the assumption that you do not have 10 single chapters yet on your hard drive.

Each "extraction" process is iterative, as Kedirekin explained. It's just a matter of what tool you want to use. If you choose DVD Shrink, you will be "building" a titleset that grows by one "chapter" each time you run through the process that Kedirekin explained. If you desire to use other tools, you can use VOB Edit and IFO Edit to "strip" or "demux" (the word depends on which tool you use) individual Cell ID's from each movie. Actually, for this process, I recommend VOB Edit because you can work on one file rather that a whole movie. For example, if your desired clip is in VTS_01_02.VOB, you can open just this file, "demux" Cells, delete those cells you don't want, and then go on to the next movie. If you choose to do this, don't forget to name your cells sequentially. I think that the default choice for the new files in VOB Edit is VTS_01_001.....VTS_01_xyz. Therefore, if you go to the same directory with your second movie, the second cell should be named something like VTS_01_002.VOB--assuming, of course that the first was _001.VOB.

At this point you have no IFO files. You can then use IFO Edit to "Create New IFO's" in the directory where your 10 chapters reside.

What you will need at this point is a Video Manager. You can create that in IFO Edit. It has its own set of problems, but you can get past them by posting in this forum. My knowlege of DVD Shrink fades at this point because I don't know if it will take a set of VOB's with just an IFO and author a titleset.

The other option you have is, as jel suggested, use an authoring tool like DVD Lab AFTER you have generated your "chapters." You might consider setting up your chapters first and then figure out how to make the titleset later. This suggests breaking your project down to smaller chunks and approaching each separately so that you don't become overwhelmed.

All of this takes time. There's a learning curve. Waiting for replies to your posts. All that kind of stuff. If you break your project down, you won't get "shot-gunned" with information that's helpful, but not directly applicable to the current situation. (I think I just confused myself..hope I was clear. :)

[farmer dan]

pcm wrote:
I took several DVDs that I owned and used DVD decryptor to rip specific chapters onto my HDD (each DVD in it's own folder).
It just hit me that you can rip chapters with DVD Decrypter, looked at your initial post, and there it was. I now need to slightly modify what I wrote this morning.

Now that you have each chapter in its own folder copy (or move) them to one folder. BUT FIRST, re-name them and number them sequentially. For example, if you have five chapters, the folder list should look something like:VTS_01_01.VOB
VTS_01_02.VOB
VTS_01_03.VOB
VTS_01_04.VOB
VTS_01_05.VOB
Now you can open IFO Edit and "Create New IFO's." (Don't forget to "Get VTS Sectors" when the operation is complete.) At this point, you can use any of the other tools discussed in this thread to create your video manager.

I know that you indidated that you could just jump forward and backward to the chapters, but if you wanted to go to a specific one using menus, then you need an authoring software like DVD Lab.

[pcm]

Kedirekin, I got stuck a bit on step two, but I think I've figured it out. What I did was open a second copy of DVDShrink and set both the first copy and the second copy into re-author mode and then I dragged titles from one to the other.

It looks like I may be able to keep the first one open and then just click open disk in the second copy of DVDShrink and drag files over.

So, in summary, I do this:

Run DVDShink (first instance)
Click Open Disk
Click Reauthor and drag over the desired titles

Run DVDShrink (second instance)
Click Open Disk
Click Reauthor and then drag the desired titles from this instance to
the first instance of DVDShrink.

Repeat the last three steps for each DVD.

Choose backup to save the final DVD.
-----------------

Can I then burn the DVD from DVDShrink, or do I have to use some other app?

Thanks for all the assistance everyone!

[Kedirekin]

DVDShrink doesn't have any burning capabilities.

I recommend using Image Tools Classic (another free tool) to create an ISO image of your end-product DVD files from Shrink. Then you can use DVDDecrypter (which you're already familiar with) in ISO Write mode to burn the image to disk.

Note that you do have to move the DVD files from Shrink into a subdirectory named VIDEO_TS, then choose the directory above this VIDEO_TS directory in Image Tool Classic. It isn't really documented anywhere, and people seemed to get confused about it a lot.

BTW: that dragging from instance 2 to the reauthor window of instance 1 didn't work for me. I just get a little icon that indicates 'can't drop here', and nothing happens. Glad it worked for you though.

[jel]

there is also a tool called AutoShrinkISO developed by NYPlayer. by all accounts it simplifies the step of writing the ISO image from the Shrink files.
it is discussed in this thread (here) (http://forum.doom9.org/showthread.php?s=&threadid=62994&perpage=20&highlight=dvd%20shrink%20iso&pagenumber=1)
and is avaliable from mr bass' site (here) (http://www.mrbass.org/dvdshrink/)
its up to version 1.6

[pcm]

Kedirekin,

Well, it's not working very well :^(

I did three DVDs and then tried to backup and I get an error when it is about 1/2 way through. It pops up a dialog that says "DVD Shrink encountered an error and cannot continue this operation. Encoding failed for an unknown reason".

I tried loading the original files I had created and then open disk, copy over three titles and then backup, and I get the same error.

So, how were you doing it? After you did the first backup, you exited DVDShrink, inserted the second DVD, ran DVDShrink, opened the IFO file from the backup, clicked re-author, dragged over the titles, and then what? You said you went back to the master window. When I'm in re-auther mode I still have one window, but 3 panes. Can you clarify.

Sorry, I'm being so dense...

[Kedirekin]

Hmmm.

Here's what I do, but I don't think it's that much different from what you're doing.

This is after I've already finished at least one disk.
Open DVDShrink
press Open Files
Open the VIDEO_TS.IFO from the prior project
Click the Reauthor button
Drag all titles from the prior project to the reauthor window
In the first DVDShrink window, click the Open Disk button
Select the DVD Drive (a mounted ISO virtual drive in my case)
drag a title from that DVD to the reauthor window
click the Backup button in the reauthor window
select (or create and select) a new directory for this project
when Shrink is done, close both windows
repeat


I just did it again, and it worked for me. The only significant difference I can see is that I'm using mounted ISOs instead of a real (encrypted) DVD.

When you get the error message, does it look like it's reading the DVD drive? Maybe Shrink is having a problem decrypting that particular disk. And did you manage to get any chapters consilidated, or did you hit this error on the first or second disk?

PS. Let me try with a real disk in the DVD drive. Should only take a couple of minutes.

[pcm]

Maybe I'm hung up on names? When you say you go to the DVDShrink window, do you mean you click in the left most pane of the app? When I choose Open Disk, it loads that and sets to "Full Disk" mode. If I click on
Re-author, the previous IFO info from the Open File is gone.

What version are you running? I'm using 2.3 of DVDShrink.

When I used two instances, I could drag titles from the re-author pane of the one instance of DVD Shrink to the main pane of the second instance. When I backup, I don't see the DVD drive light at all. I think it is backing uo the first disks files and then it gives the error.

[Kedirekin]

I just completed the test (appending a chapter from an encrypted DVD). It worked for me without any error messages, and I was able to play the final project in WinDVD without issue.

I just realized that DVDShrink is creating separate titles for each chapter, rather than separate chapters in one title. Is that going to work for you? It means that you can't just skip chapters, you have to move through titles - and as most DVD players don't have a title button on the front face (you need the remote for that), I'm not sure this will work for you after all. You mentioned taking this disk to a store to test players, and I don't think stores normally let you play with the remote.

[Kedirekin]

Ah, that's why we're seeing different behavior. I've been using 3.0 beta 5.

Does 2.3 have deCSS built in? I seem to recall it doesn't.

[farmer dan]

Kedireken wrote:
I just realized that DVDShrink is creating separate titles for each chapter, rather than separate chapters in one title. Is that going to work for you? It means that you can't just skip chapters, you have to move through titles - and as most DVD players don't have a title button on the front face (you need the remote for that), I'm not sure this will work for you after all. You mentioned taking this disk to a store to test players, and I don't think stores normally let you play with the remote.
The IFO Edit above will give you the "separate chapters in one title."

[pcm]

I'll download the latest version. With my latest try, I've ran DVDShrink, opened a DVD, grabbed a title, selected start/end chapters,
and backed it up to a directory. I repeated this with each DVD, going to a different directory.

Should I try to combine them with DVD Shrink, or try to use IFO edit? I have the specific chapters that I want, already pulled out. I do want to have the chapters separate on the DVD, so I can press the arrow to jump to the next chapter, if desired.

[Kedirekin]

I'd try the IfoEdit route. Unfortunately this is far beyond my level of experience. Every time I've tried to do anything more complicated than Get VTS Sectors in IfoEdit, I end up with an unplayable DVD.

[pcm]

Thanks for you help so far Kedirekin! I'll post more follow-up questions on how to use IFO Edit, but first I want to look to see if there are any guides, so I don't ask too many dumb questions :^)