Re: [SLUG] preserving a full DVD w/ compression

From: Ian C. Blenke (icblenke@nks.net)
Date: Tue Sep 04 2007 - 18:20:41 EDT


Mario Lombardo wrote:

>>On Tuesday 04 September 2007 14:55, Mario Lombardo wrote:
>>How can I preserve the full DVD content, menu intact, while having the
>>portability of excellent compression as with some codecs
>>

Er, sorry, back to your original question:

The .vob files themselves have the menus encoded into them. Those files
aren't "only video", they also include other formatted metadata that
enable that extended content.

While you can rip an entire DVD with decss (or something that uses
libcss), this only removes the silly encryption of the DVD media.

This would allow you to burn your own unencrypted DVDs, or play the .vob
formatted files directly off your harddrive, including all menus and
extended content that were on the DVD originals.

    mplayer --dvd-device /path/to/copy/of/vob/files dvd://1

Doing this does require all of the space, however.

Think of a .vob files as an encapsulated filesystem with metadata and
other bits that are part of the representation of your video, menus, and
extended content.

Quite simply, there is no way to re-encode video with a different codec
and still have a DVD compliant player able to play said content.

Not only would you need to regenerate the vob files with the modified
codec video inside, you would need to change the specifications of that
vob format as well as every DVD player to be aware of the codec used for
your video.

DVD players know MPEG2, I'm fairly certain the DVD format specs don't
permit you to do what you are thinking of doing.

Then again, mastering DVDs isn't my day job ;)

I have heard mention now and again of theora formatted video metadata
for menuing and whatnot, though when I've seen such things it has
usually been for one specific software player or another.

Converting from a DVD menu to some other software player menuing system
is quite nebulous.

You'll probably be better off just buying more disk space to store your
unencrypted DVDs in .vob form.

 - Ian C. Blenke <ian@blenke.com> http://ian.blenke.com/

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