Ripping Short clips from DVDs for a compilation

[zedstrange]

I have been ripping DVD's to DivX and XSVCD's for some time now, but still class myself as a newbie and didnt know which section this belongs in anyway. :-)

On this occasion I wish to extract small sections from the DVD to make a Compilation disc. Basically these are the musical sequences from the DVD (not chapters) ranging from 1 to 5mins in length.

I wish to create an XSVCD with the final result (however i will probably also create a DivX file as well for the Xbox)

I have the Vobs on my hard drive, I no longer have the actual DVD.

I figure this would be easy, but each way I consider doing appears cumbersome, for example requires seperate editing of audio and video.
After two days of forum absorbing all I have successfully come up with is how to do the Fade in/out with AVIsynth.

I am reasonably familiar with all the tools that come with Gknot, DVD2SCD, Vdub and VdubMOD

I have tried using VdubMOD but was not happy with the way the Audio comes out and you cannot edit this audio anyway in Vdub, only playback. Also playback of the Vobs in VdubMod is slow, about 10fps so its hard to listen to the audio to find the exact right spots to cut.

There is probably quite a few ways of doing this task, all that i can think of will take many manual steps.

If you were doing this exercise how would you do it, the quickest way whilst retaining excellent audio/stereo quality?

[killingspree]

hi,
well here's how i'd do it:

create DVD2AVI project, demux audio
create avisynth script with mpeg2source, load audio with ac3source()!
find trim commands!
make direct stream copy of the audio (possibly decode to wave - if not done already - honestly i'm not sure if the trimming and appending works with ac3 source) - encode it seperately to mp3 for divx to mp2 for SVCD
Do the video encoding with Vdubmod (for divx) or with CCE (for SVCD)
muxing, burning, etc


i know it's quite a few manual steps, but i don't really think there's a way to automate this!

cheers
steVe

[manono]

Hi-

I think that I'd use the "[" and "]" keys in DVD2AVI to isolate the music tracks at the beginning. Make your .d2v, demuxing the audio at the same time, and then take it from there.

[zedstrange]

Originally posted by manono I think that I'd use the "[" and "]" keys in DVD2AVI to isolate the music tracks at the beginning.

Its not a music DVD so i need to listen to the audio while doing the editing and there is no audio in DVD2AVI, so thats too hard :-)

Thankyou Killingspree for the suggestions, for now i havent gone down that track - yet but the way things are going, I might as well.:-) (anyway what you are suggesting is almost what i am trying now)

What i have been trying so far is thus. Used Gknot to rip the VOBS to a nice big DivX format, and then edit with Vdub. I never thought of that originally as I always thought you could only cut DivX movies at a Keyframe, but apparently not. Did that change?

Firstly I used AC3 format for the Audio in Gknot but that doesnt work in Vdub. But a bit of searching here leads me downloading this.
http://fcchandler.home.comcast.net/

Anyway I wasnt happy with the way AC3 was turning out, the volume was low, and there was another problem I forgot about by now.

So next I re-processed the VOBS into Divx and converted the audio to MP3. Now i get the VBR error in Vdub, after another hour lost in these forums, i made the MP3 again using CBR instead and i seem to be on track now. I thought it quite odd that this VBR error in Vdub is a common problem posted in the forum, but everybody suggests complex solutions, using CBR seemed so much easier.

I can now happily use VdubMod to cut sections from the AVI exactly where i want them. So far so good.

My final goal is to fade in/out each clip and then join them together. Should be easy right? - NO!

I can join my seperate files together ( a lot of people have that problem so i tested that first) but when I create an AVIsynth script, to fade in/out, and open with VdubMod with set Video processng to to "Direct Stream Copy", the AVI tests as expected. So now i "Save as AVI" and the output file has grown from 20mb to 400mb. (its still a DivX format) why does the file size change, there has been no processing or conversion?
(same thing happens in both Vdub and Vdubmod)

[killingspree]

Well actually you are doing something quite different from the way i described. if you do it 'my way', you'll save yourself the step of encoding to divx before editing! so in the end you'll have one encoding step less!

I thought it quite odd that this VBR error in Vdub is a common problem posted in the forum, but everybody suggests complex solutions, using CBR seemed so much easier.
well quite a lot of people - including myself btw - are really keen on quality, some may say we're almost fanatic, but that's the way it is! :) cbr just doesn't offer the same quality as abr/vbr at lower bitrates... but you're right it definitely IS the easiest solution!

I can join my seperate files together ( a lot of people have that problem so i tested that first) but when I create an AVIsynth script, to fade in/out, and open with VdubMod with set Video processng to to "Direct Stream Copy", the AVI tests as expected. So now i "Save as AVI" and the output file has grown from 20mb to 400mb. (its still a DivX format) why does the file size change, there has been no processing or conversion?
(same thing happens in both Vdub and Vdubmod)
you got something wrong there! see you can't do any formating of the video without reencoding! it's simply not possible! even if you just do fade - ins and -outs you'll have to reencode the entire video (unless you cut it into little pieces and only encode the fades to put it all together lateron...)
So, once again my suggestion! do the ripping/d2v'ing/frameserving manually... you'll save yourself a lot of time and hassle!! for a basic avisynth frameserving guide go here:
http://www.doom9.org/mpg/d2a-mpeg2dec.htm
be aware of the fact that dvd2avi and mpeg2dec3 have been renamed! the combination is now known under the name of dgmpgdec toolset!

cheers
steVe