Help me figure out how to get this DVD to play

smhontz wrote on 8/31/2004, 9:23 PM
I have a friend who had another friend create her a DVD of her photographs. Problem is, the DVD won't play in almost every player she tries it in. I said I would take a look at it and see if I could extract the data and burn it to something a little more compatible. But I'm having trouble with the process and was hoping someone might be able to help.

Here's what I know about the faulty DVD:
1. It's a DVD-R.
2. DVDInfoPro tells me it has a media code of MXLRG01, so I assume it's some sort of Maxell.
3. It's got a pasted paper label on it.
4. AviCodec tells me that the main .VOB file is encoded at 9,000 kbps, with AC3 audio at 224 Kbps.
5. It looks like it was built with Roxio DVDBuilder.
6. It doesn't have an AUDIO_TS directory.
7. It has a ROXIOPLASMA and VIDEO_TS directory.

I can play the disk from my Sony DRU500 DVD burner. So, I figured I could just copy the VIDEO_TS directory to my hard drive, make an empty AUDIO_TS, and use DVD Architect to burn a new disk to a RITEK G04 (which always work for me) WITHOUT a label and I'd be good to go. Unfortunately, this disk won't play either in a set-top player either (it'll play in my Sony Burner, though.) So now I'm thinking that the encoding is screwy.

I want to pull the video into Vegas so I can re-encode it. I tried DVD2Avi to rip the .VOB file to an .avi but it produced nothing. I tried DVD Decrypter and it made a .vob but when I pull it into Vegas it's only about 28 secs long instead of the full 5 mins.

Any other ideas? Since it won't play in a set-top player, I can't just capture the video output. I need some way to work with the data files that are on the disk.

Comments

farss wrote on 8/31/2004, 9:31 PM
I've had this problem with the odd DVD. Two things seem to get screwed up. The ac3 track may contain additional data blocks which cuases things like BeSweet to loose the plot after a few seconds. The same thing may have happened with the mpeg stream as well.

However as they're still capturing back from a DVD player wouldn't do muc for quality unless you can capture via component.

Might just be easier to start again.

Bob.

PS, I've wasted untold hours trying to do this with several 'odd' DVDs and in the end even when I could get it to fly I'd then find something else subtle was wrong, like the field order was wrong. I just bounce those sort of jobs now. Only thing I've had success with is pulling files back from stuff done with Vegas / DVDA.
B.Verlik wrote on 8/31/2004, 9:55 PM
I thought I've read here, that any encoding above 8,000 kbps, might have problems playing on some set tops. This worries me as I've been using 8,000 kbps, as my upper limit, but so far nobody has complained and it works in my set tops. 9,000 kbps might be a real problem. Have you tried using DVDShrink for ripping? It's free if you can find it. I believe I found mine at DVDRhelp.com. I don't understand the time difference. I also thought that Vegas couldn't handle .VOBs, but I'm still using 4.0. I've also seen a VOB edit tool at the same site, but have never tried it. So I can't give you any first hand info. DVDShrink is a great decrypter/ripper that's super easy to use, but don't know if it will help your problem.
jamcas wrote on 9/1/2004, 6:48 AM
I had a problem like this and found that if the disc was short / had less than 1 gig of data on it then it wouldnt play on some setup dvd players even though it played ok on my pc dvd rom. try using nero to burn the disc and there is 1 gig compatibility option you can set to yes,

regards
Jaime
johnmeyer wrote on 9/1/2004, 7:17 AM
AviCodec tells me that the main .VOB file is encoded at 9,000 kbps, with AC3 audio at 224 Kbps.

The most likely problem is the 9,000 kbps. To fix this you need to re-encode (DVD Shrink does not change the encoding rate, so that won't help).

Easiest way is to drag the VOB file(s) onto the Vegas timeline. This will give you the video. To get the audio, see these links:

Extracting Video from a DVD image

VOB files

straight path for reauthoring

Once you have it all on the timeline, render video using the MPEG-2 encoding, with the DVD Architect NTSC template. Click on Custom and set the average bitrate for this template to 7,000 kbps.

DVD Architect might be able to use the VOB files as the audio source, but I doubt it. You can extract the AC-3 audio using Womble's MPEG Wizard, but if you don't have that, it costs money. You could also simply re-encode the AC-3 audio from the Vegas timeline. Use the AC-3 Stereo template, and leave it at the default settings.
riredale wrote on 9/1/2004, 10:09 AM
My guess is that it was probably a poor burn, either because of the burner or the medium. Encoding at 9Mb/sec, even in CBR mode, is well within the DVD legal specs, but if the reader has a difficult time pulling the data in then a high bitrate will just make matters worse. As for labels, I have done over 500 DVDs to date with labels, no problems (obviously, if you can see that the label is clearly off-center or has bubbles, then that could be an issue).

Have you tried renaming the vob file to mpg and bringing that into the Vegas timeline?

In my own experience, DVD player incompatibility has been due to (a) authoring program issues and (b) media issues. Right now I use Maestro for the authoring, and exclusively use Ritek G04 blanks. I am not that familiar with the Vegas authoring program, but assume it too does a fine job.
smhontz wrote on 9/1/2004, 12:32 PM
Well, I finally was able to get a new DVD made. In my quest, I decided that the problem lie in the high bit rate encoding, as I was able to just make a straight copy of the disk to another media and it still didn't work. So, I had to re-encode the media.

I tried pulling the .vob into Vegas, but it would only see 28 secs of the 5:30 movie. So, something was wrong there. I tried several different ripping programs and finally got Flask to work after some fiddling. I was able to decode to a .avi file, which included the audio. I could then put the video and audio in Vegas. The video was fine, but the audio had little glitches in it. So I used DVD2Avi (which wasn't able to extract the video, by the way) to extract the AC3 into a .wav file and used that.

I then rendered in Vegas and burned in DVD Architect. Success! Unfortunately, the conversion from the orignal MPEG2 to avi wasn't totally clean - there was some blockiness and squirm in some areas of the pictures. So, I don't think my friend (who is a professional photographer) will like it as-is - but, I'm hoping she'll have ME do the project this time, and do it the right way.

Thanks for the help.
johnmeyer wrote on 9/1/2004, 2:53 PM
You might try the DVDrHelp Forum. They have many tools including, if I remember correctly, some that are aimed at re-encoding and transcoding MPEG files.