Re: Organising DVD backups on HD

"Ken Maltby" <kmaltby@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:


"Terry Pinnell" <terrypin@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote in message
news:bgjbo4hra6m3q3tlsecifqrlq5unsabhve@xxxxxxxxxx
Terry Pinnell <terrypin@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:

Great post, thanks Ken!

I hadn't realised the names were so tolerant. So that revelation will
make an enormous difference to my thinking.

Of course, it still means there's a lot of manual work to be done in
renaming. For example, suppose I open this HD folder on my 'WD My Book
USB 1TB drive' (like Netmask's BTW):
K:\DVD Archives\2003 Hols

It contains two subfolders, AUDIO_TS and VIDEO_TS. I'll delete
AUDIO_TS. (I was nervous about that before you just told me it was
unnecessary, despite it being empty, as I vaguely thought I'd once had
a program object to not finding it.) And I'll rename VIDEO_TS to '2003
Hols'.

That now contains these:

VIDEO_TS.BUP
VIDEO_TS.IFO
VIDEO_TS.VOB
VTS_01_0.BUP
VTS_01_0.IFO
VTS_01_1.VOB
VTS_02_0.BUP
VTS_02_0.IFO
VTS_02_1.VOB

I know (either by playing the IFO and looking at the menu, or playing
individual VOBs, or - more quickly - from my spreadsheet DVDIndex.xls)
that it contains two tracks (chapters? I've never been 100% sure about
the right term). These are called 'Marl' and 'Mayrhofen'. But I was
naively hoping the menu data entered at the authoring stage might
survive as readable text in either the .IFO or .BUP files. And that
some clever programmer had capitalised on that to write a utility
along the lines I described. But after opening a few examples in my
hex editor I now realise that was a futile idea.

But after that manual cross-referencing and renaming exercise I do
indeed now have a much more meaningful structure:

2003Hols.BUP
2003Hols.IFO
2003Hols.VOB
Marl.BUP
Marl.IFO
Marl.VOB
Mayrhofen.BUP
Mayrhofen.IFO
Mayrhofen.VOB

Looks like either I was a bit premature in that post or have
misunderstood something. When I now try to play the DVD from that HD
folder by r-clicking 2003Hols.IFO and choosing 'Open in PowerDVD', I
get 'No disc in drive D:' instead of the main title menu. There is of
course no disc in drive D: (my DVD player), because I've removed it.

If I close that message and click the 'Select source' button and
choose 'Open DVD file on hard disk drive', the OK button is greyed out
whatever folder I browse to. So dead end there.

If I change the files back to their original names, and open
VIDEO_TS.IFO, then I get correct behaviour.

--
Terry, East Grinstead, UK

Renaming the individual .ifo files was something beyound my
original suggestion, of renaming the VIDEO_TS folders.

Yes, I see that now - I was hastily over optimistic!

Basicly, I feel it is best to treat the DVD as a whole object,
for the purpose of playback, and not try to "reach inside it"
and deal directly with the individual titles, for playback. That
way you have the benifit of the menus, you created to deal
with selecting things to playback.

I processed about 30 DVDs before the penny dropped last night. I've
just started going back through them to restore the original
'standard' names. But I think I'll pause and think this through. As I
originally mentioned,and as you say below ...

Each player seems to have their own way of approaching this.
Some do indeed respond badlly to changing the names of the
individual files of the folder.

While renaming the individual .ifo files for the VTS is new to
me, it may not be a totally lost cause. I'll look into it some more.

If you want to organize your video on your hard drive without
regard to "DVD backups", there are a number of other things
you can do. Simply using the file structure with useful names
for the clips and the folders you put them in, is one.

.... I could abandon the 'exact backup' approach and instead keep the
individual VOBs under appropriate names. So my 2003 Hols folder would
just hold these two files:

Marl.VOB
Mayrhofen.VOB

I could then easily access those (e.g. in VideoRedo) to include clips
in new DVDs, and if my original DVD disc ever failed then I could
re-make the DVD in TDA 1.6 or whatever, albeit not necessarily an
exact reproduction.

One point I've read mixed opinions about is whether I should leave
those files with their VOB extensions, change them to MPG manually, or
run VOB2MPG on each of them?

If it matters, my stuff is mostly very simple. Family DVDs typically
with 1 to 8 'titles', each one usually corresponding to a button on a
main menu. (See example below.) In a few cases I've gone 'down' a
level to several chapters within a title.

Another point is the possible snag that some of the titles get split
into two or more sections if they're larger than 1GB. Here's an
example showing the files now on my HD within the folder
K:\DVD Archives\2006 Hols

VIDEO_TS.BUP 16 KB
VIDEO_TS.IFO 16 KB
VIDEO_TS.VOB 14,608 KB
VTS_01_0.BUP 14 KB
VTS_01_0.IFO 14 KB
VTS_01_1.VOB 321,182 KB
VTS_02_0.BUP 26 KB
VTS_02_0.IFO 26 KB
VTS_02_1.VOB 1,048,404 KB
VTS_02_2.VOB 34,336 KB
VTS_03_0.BUP 18 KB
VTS_03_0.IFO 18 KB
VTS_03_1.VOB 399,650 KB
VTS_04_0.BUP 20 KB
VTS_04_0.IFO 20 KB
VTS_04_1.VOB 745,776 KB

Here's the menu for that DVD:
http://i154.photobucket.com/albums/s247/terrypin999/2006Hols-Merging4.jpg

So the Berlin holiday was just a little too long for a single VOB. If
I followed the approach above I suppose I'd save these?

Sicily.VOB
Berlin-1.VOB
Berlin-2.VOB
Dartmoor.VOB
Pyrenees.VOB

As you may remember I use MultiMedia Builder (MMB) to
create HD menues to access video files that I have stored on
my LAN.

Once that was on my To Experiment List, but I've never go around to
it!

There are a number programs available to organize and present
media, some for free download.

Luck;
Ken

--
Terry, East Grinstead, UK

.

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