DVD Ripping: What's the best tool for the job?

on www.afterdawn.com always brightens my day with solid tutorials. 🙂

Using DVDRemake Pro alongside DVD Shrink:

http://www.afterdawn.com/guides/arch...e_tutorial.cfm

Jose Chase2 said:Stick with TDK media; they're top-tier, trust me.👍

That’s exactly what I used to believe—until recently! 😲

A little cautionary tale from my job:
The data was burned on a Pioneer drive (!) using TDK DVD-R at 4x speed, actually recorded at 2x.
It sat in a cool, dry, dark storage spot for about four months (from November 2004 to March 2005).
When we pulled them out to copy some files... absolutely nothing. Zilch. 👎

It honestly leaves you questioning everything—your choice of media, your hardware, all of it. 😢

Oh, and just for the record... before they were stored, I had verified all the CRC values against the original DVD template and checked everything via the PlayStation method (which is basically what 99% of us skip, even though it's vital when the data actually matters) and everything looked perfectly fine. 😁 😠

THE LESSON LEARNED:
Ever since I picked up my own DVD burner about six months ago, I've made it a rule to burn everything onto two different types of media.(I'll use +R for one set and -R for another, or split movies across two different brands of -R), sourced from two entirely different manufacturers....
That way, there's a much smaller chance of everything going to hell at once. And honestly, for the few extra bucks it costs to grab a single high-quality disc—you know, something reliable like Verbatim, Sony, or TDK—it is well worth the peace of mind.

Now you're starting to scare me!

And here I was, feeling pretty proud of myself for backing up all those photos onto a single 😢TDK DVD
.

My apologies, it certainly wasn't intentional 😁

Honestly, even I was caught completely off guard when a colleague dropped that news on me this past Wednesday. 😲

In any case, this just goes to reinforce my long-standing theory: you really ought to be backing everything up with two separate copies on two different types of media from entirely different manufacturers.
It becomes an incredibly tall order to have both of them fail simultaneously via PM 😁 🙄

melloweagle26 said:Anyway, this just goes to prove my theory all over again: it’s always better to burn two copies onto two different types of media from two different manufacturers. Just safer that way.
Well, then it’s actually pretty tough if both of them end up heading to my PMs at the same time. 😁 🙄

It’s like listening to my little brother. Only he goes a step further and insists you need to store your DVDs in different locations just in case of a fire or an earthquake.😁 Seriously.

I'm with you on that.

melloweagle26 said:My apologies, that wasn't intentional. 😁

🙂

I’ve been thinking about heading over to the HG spot this Monday to try a different approach. One thing is for certain, though: I’m definitely going to be running backups on top of backups. When you guys put it that way, there's really no other way to play it. 🤔

I ran into a similar issue with discs before. But it only happened with the kvarkov ones—after two or three months, no player would touch them. Meanwhile, my LiteOn handles everything else just fine.

Just finished a fresh test on some DVD media—honestly, TDK is pretty underwhelming.
They might be the kings of CDs, but 👍
click here for the test

Hmmmm... what on earth is one even supposed to make of this? 😲😲

Based on those results, it looks like every single piece of Verbatim media out there is performing even worse than the TDK stuff. 🙄
It’s honestly quite baffling...

So, Memorex and Smartbuy are at the top? I always figured those were bottom-tier junk 🤔

Anyway, my own progress is pretty slow—it feels like I never have enough free time to actually mess around with this stuff 🙄

But for now, it seems easiest to just rip whatever movies I need directly from streams, shrink them if necessary, and build my own menus 🤔. In 90% of cases, the bonus features are useless anyway ☕

Douglas Phillips4 said:I ran into a similar issue with my discs. But specifically with the kvark ones—after about two or three months, no drive would pick them up. My LiteOn, however, still works wonders with them...

Honestly, those kvark CDs are total garbage—about as reliable as a broken mirror.👎

I don't know, I'm sticking with TDK, Traxdata, and Verbatim.

Douglas Phillips4 said:Wait, so Memorex and Smartbuy are actually at the top of the list? I honestly thought those were just bottom-shelf junk.🤔

Right? 😁Exactly my thoughts...
Man, I don't even know what to believe anymore; at this point, you can't trust a single thing you read online.
Maybe I should just burn everything in batches of three and call it a day, haha.
😬 😵

Anyway, back to the topic at hand...

I spent some time experimenting yesterday, and I've hit a bit of a snag: I'm ripping a DVD using DVD Shrink (Jose Chase2, don't lose your cool just yet, I'm still playing 😉). I use the re-author mode to pull out just the movie, the audio, and the subtitles (by the way, if I try to rip just the specific streams I need directly from the disc, DVD Shrink glitches out and refuses to cooperate). So far, so good. But once I move over to TMPGEnc to build the menu and prep everything for burning—the subtitles are gone. It seems like this software doesn't know how to handle them; I haven't found anything in the help files or the settings regarding subtitle support. Does it just discard them entirely?
When I try making the menus in DVDLab, the same thing happens—no subtitles. I can import external ones, but it won't recognize the ones already embedded in the film. Either that, or I'm just missing something obvious.

Any advice?

Eh, I’m guessing you’d need to use IfoEdit for that—but I haven't really messed around with it much because every time I try, I end up screwing it up too.🙂

Basically, when you're working with subtitles in DVDLab, it saves them as .sp1, .sp2, and similar extensions. In my head, the logic should be pretty simple: just extract the subtitles from the DVD stream in their original format (whatever that may be), use DVDLab to create a DVD with a dummy subtitle (just one line of text is enough to trigger the subtitle stream), and then swap the subtitles out using IfoEdit.

Anyway, there's a tutorial on the drive about how to swap subtitles on a DVD, so go poke around there.

Google

hmda, it’s just common sense... I figured the most logical move was to leave the movie untouched and just use the subtitles I already set up... anyway, I'm going to go take a walk out in the yard 🙂

as for extracting the subtitles—I used to do that back when I worked with DivX, but there’s no way I’m planning on doing that for DVDs too 👎

Douglas Phillips4 said:As for extracting subtitles—I used to do that back in the day for DivX, but I don't see myself doing that for DVDs anytime soon. 👎

I wasn't talking about converting them to text—I meant extracting the streams exactly as they are (like what DVDLab saves as a .sp1).

For example, if you open a VOB file with the TMPG Demultiplexer, you'll see that besides the MPEG and AC3 streams, there are other streams present. One of those is the subtitle stream, I just don't know which format I should save them in.

Nero 🙏 🙏 🙏 🙏 🙏 🙏 🙏 🙏

Jose Chase2 said:I wasn't talking about converting them to text, but rather extracting the streams exactly as they are—basically what DVDLab saves as an .sp1 file.

For instance, if you open a VOB file using the TMPG Demuxer, you'll see that besides the MPEG and AC3 streams, there are several other streams present. One of those is the subtitle track, but I'm just not sure which format is best to save them in.

Man... way too much hassle. Forget the menus. 😉

tokic_ said:Nero... 🙏 🙏 🙏 🙏

Nooo... 🙏 🙏 🙏 🙏

I think I’ve finally cracked it 🙂. It’s a fairly straightforward process, and the quality is top-notch:

First, I use DVD Decrypter to rip the entire movie into an ISO image, then I mount that image as a virtual drive using Daemon Tools. I prefer this because it makes browsing the files incredibly fast and easy (anyone can look up what Daemon does if they aren't familiar). Once mounted, I open the ISO with DVD Shrink. Using the Re-author mode, I select just the main menu—it has a preview feature, so there's almost no way to mess it up—along with the specific audio stream and subtitles I want. (Pro tip: if you have multiple options, right-clicking on the DVD structure gives you a great "Set default streams" option). Under Compression, I select "no compression" and hit Backup, again saving it as an ISO image. This essentially turns the intro menu into a quick video clip that plays before the actual movie starts—no interactive functions, obviously. In this case, I'm really just using DVD Shrink to "extract" exactly what I need from the disc. After that, I run it through DVDRemake to compress it, and it's ready to be burned onto a standard DVD 👍

Why not just do everything with DVD Shrink? Honestly, I think Jose Chase2 is right about the quality. Even though I used DVD Shrink for all of The Bourne Supremacy and followed this other method for Matrix—two very different films—I'm pretty certain the DVD Shrink version had lower quality and, even worse, a much grainier picture.

Well, look at me, basically writing a tutorial here 👍.

Which DVD burner should I go with?

Major props for all these ripping tools you guys share.

Personally, I’ve been sticking with DVD Shrink and Nero.

Quick question though—whenever the video stutters or the audio skips during playback, how do I know if it's the DVD player acting up, a bad disc, a crappy burner, or just bad settings from the software? What's your take?