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Old 01-27-2013, 09:37 PM   #1
haertig
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Question: Backing up a DVD, multiple titles, including menus


I am looking for a way to backup some exercise DVD's that my wife bought and uses all the time. The set was fairly expensive and she plays the DVDs a lot. So I'm looking for a way to back them up for safekeeping (probably use the backups for day-to-day use and keep the originals safely stored away).

I am familiar with how to back up DVDs when you are only interested in the main title without menus. I do this from the command line. But what I don't have great knowledge of is backing up 7Gb+ dual sided DVDs with menus and shrinking them to 4.7Gb single sided size in the process. I have tried a few apps. DVD95 looked like it was trying to work, but what it finally came out with was unplayable. My DVD player said it was PAL. But I don't know if it really was PAL or that was just the DVD player saying "I don't understand this". I could find no setting in DVD95 where you can choose NTSC or PAL. When I use dvdauthor manually (on other projects), I set the environment variable VIDEO_FORMAT=NTSC. I'm not sure if this is required anymore, it may just be a holdover from older version of dvdauthor I had to deal with. I've just staying in the habit of specifying this variable. I wonder if that would work with DVD95, if indeed the problem was truely PAL vs. NTSC and not just some other corruption?

I looked at Handbrake. But I didn't get around to actually using it, because it appears it only rips to a file (doesn't author a DVD), and it can only shrink things by lowering the bitrate. Maybe I didn't dig deeply enough into it. I'm familiar with tcrequant from the commandline to shrink video. I'm not sure exactly how tcrequant does it's magic, but I believe it is more sophisticated than simply lowering the bitrate as Handbrake appears to do. But I really don't know exactly what "requantization" is...

K9copy is something I might evaluate. The problem there is that I'm running LinuxMint13 Xfce, and while K9copy is installable, there are about 15 gadzillion dependencies it wants to install. I am not sure I want to tread down that path.

As a last resort, I could consider just buying some blank double sided DVDs and skip the "shrink the video" part. I wonder how universally compatible double sided DVD-R (or +R) are with standalone DVD players however.

And pointers of a direction I should research? Support for menus is a must, since these are necessary for using the exercise DVDs I'm trying to backup. Commandline is fine too, even if complex. I even considered authoring my own menus from scratch with "dvdauthor" after shrinking the video. I am already familiar with using an XML file to control dvdauthor ... that's what I'm doing currently with other non-menu DVD projects ... and adding menus there (with the help of Gimp) doesn't look terribly difficult (but it's tedious). Still, it would be easier if I didn't have to do this manual authoring of menus.

Thanks in advance for any tips!
 
Old 01-28-2013, 01:32 AM   #2
Abscissa256
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DVD Shrink handles that fantastically, but unfortunately it's only on Windows

You could try running it with Wine, but I have no idea if that'll work. If not, maybe you could install Win in a VM using VirtualBox, and run DVD Shrink inside that.

Sorry I'm not aware of a Linux-only way to do it, but I thought I'd mention this just in case it helps.
 
Old 01-28-2013, 03:29 PM   #3
jefro
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Kind of depends on the encryption used. It may or may not be able to easily be copied and that doesn't get to the legal aspect. Might be easy as dd.

Many dvd players used for tv also run other formats just fine, it may not have to be in the original form. Some sort of rip may do. I don't copy dvd's to dvd so I can't say for sure what is best. I'd guess K9copy may be the most easy. Any app you want will require many extra files.
 
Old 01-28-2013, 03:44 PM   #4
schneidz
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Code:
[schneidz@hyper ide-34]$ vobcopy -h
Vobcopy 1.2.0 - GPL Copyright (c) 2001 - 2009 robos@muon.de

Usage: vobcopy 
if you want the main feature (title with most chapters) you don't need _any_ options!
Options:
[-m (mirror the whole dvd)] 
[-M (Main title - i.e. the longest (playing time) title on the dvd)] 
[-i /path/to/the/mounted/dvd/]
[-n title-number] 
[-t <your name for the dvd>] 
[-o /path/to/output-dir/ (can be "stdout" or "-")] 
[-f (force output)]
[-V (version)]
[-v (verbose)]
[-v -v (create log-file)]
[-h (this here ;-)] 
[-I (infos about title, chapters and angles on the dvd)]
[-1 /path/to/second/output/dir/] [-2 /.../third/..] [-3 /../] [-4 /../]
[-b <skip-size-at-beginning[bkmg]>] 
[-e <skip-size-at-end[bkmg]>]
[-O <single_file_name1,single_file_name2, ...>] 
[-q (quiet)]
[-w <watchdog-minutes>]
[-x (overwrite all)]
[-F <fast-factor:1..64>]
[-l (large-file support for files > 2GB)]
edit: i'm sorry i didnt read the whole thing. what i posted above is what the op already knows how to do (extract the main title from a dvd).

Last edited by schneidz; 01-28-2013 at 03:55 PM.
 
Old 01-28-2013, 04:05 PM   #5
TobiSGD
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K9Copy: http://k9copy.sourceforge.net/web/index.php/en/
Not actively maintained anymore since a few weeks ago, but for your purpose that shouldn't matter.
 
Old 01-29-2013, 06:00 PM   #6
haertig
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Solved

Every Linux native solution I tried failed in one way or another. DVD95, Brasero, K9Copy. I got it done like this:

(1) "dvdbackup -Mv -i /dev/sr0" to rip the dual-layer DVD in it's entirety to the HDD

(2) "DVDShrink" (a Windows GUI program, run under Wine) to read the content off the HDD, shrink it, and author a new DVD (with menus intact)

(3) "growisofs -use-the-force-luke=notray -speed=1 -Z /dev/sr0 -dvd-video the_video_directory" to burn the result back to a single-layer DVD
 
Old 01-29-2013, 07:32 PM   #7
schneidz
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thanks for posting the result.

do you know what dvdshrink does ? does it remove extra features and language tracks to make the dvd smaller (keeping only the main title) ?
or does it re-encode the video using a smaller bitrate ?

i'm curious how it fits a gallon of liquid in a 2-liter bottle.

regards,
 
Old 01-29-2013, 11:58 PM   #8
haertig
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DVDShrink does both. It can remove extra stuff (you get to choose what) AND it can shrink things to fit on a smaller DVD. As to HOW DVDShrink shrinks things when it reencodes them, I don't know. Reduce bitrate? Requantize? What does "requantize" mean anyway? Is that just another way of saying "reduce the bitrate"? I don't know.

If you want, you can have DVDShrink only extract the main title, with an English audio track, and no menues. That's the basic thing you would probably want to do for most movies. If that fits on a smaller DVD, fine. If not, it will be shrunk until it fits. Or, you can leave all the menus, multiple titles, multiple different language audio tracks, special features, director commentary, etc. all in place. Of course if you do that, the stuff will be bigger, necessitating a more aggressive shrinking.

For the exercise DVDs I just backed up, I removed all the foreign language audio tracks and all the subtitles, but left everything else intact. That left me with about 7Gb worth of stuff remaining, which DVDShrink then shrunk down to 4.4Gb for burning on the smaller DVD. Obviously, something had to go, bit-wise, to allow for the shrinking. But I can't tell any discernable difference between the originals and the shrunken copies. I guess it's like a JPEG vs. a TIFF photograph. The TIFF holds more information, but most people can't tell the difference between a reasonably compressed JPEG and a TIFF, and are perfectly happy with the JPEG.

BTW, if you download DVDShrink from it's official website, what you get is a "downloader" that then tries to download the actual program. That downloader failed for me under Wine. So I went to Softpedia and downloaded DVDShrink from there. At Softpedia you get the actual program, not a downloader that subsequently downloads the program.
 
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Old 01-30-2013, 08:23 AM   #9
schneidz
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thanx, something like this mite be an alternate. i never had the need since i dont have a dvd drive any more so this is untested:
Code:
lsdvd && vobcopy -m
for vob in `find . -iname "*.vob"`
do
 tcextract -i $vob -t vob -x mpeg2 > $vob.m2v
 tcextract -i $vob -a 0 -x ac3 -t vob > $vob.ac3
 tcrequant -i $vob.m2v -o $vob.shrinked.m2v -f 1.5 # season to taste
 mplex -f 8 -o $vob.final.mpg $vob.shrinked.m2v $vob.ac3
 mv $vob.final.mpg $vob; rm $vob.m2v $vob.ac3 $vob.shrinked.m2v
done
not sure if messing with the size of vob's will mess up with the ifo files but worth a shot.

Last edited by schneidz; 01-30-2013 at 08:26 AM.
 
  


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