DVD-9 to DVD-5 "Full Copy" Instructions

NOTE!!! Please bear in mind that this was written assuming you already have some basic knowledge of the software tools listed. If you do not, I STRONGLY urge you to read the guides and do some searches for past posts here on the forum. To explain every little detail of how to use the software would be totally redundant and a waste of time for those who have spent the time to LEARN to do things before asking questions. I don’t mean for this to sound rude but you really should understand the basics. The guides and previous posts are here for a reason. Also, this guide only works for single PGC titles (most DVD's ARE). With this in mind, this guide should still work for most of the titles out there. Please check Jdobbs' post on the second page of this thread.

Software you will need…

DVD Maestro
CCE
DVD2AVI
SubRip 1.02
Chapter Xtractor
Pulldown.exe
DVD Decrypter or SmartRipper
AVISynth (or VFAPI)
IFOUpdate

I personally use Nero for burning but others will work as well. A note concerning Nero, version 5.5.8.0 seems to be the magic number. Earlier versions do not handle DVD Video as well and the current 5.5.8.2 will return a “One or more files (mostly VOB-file(s)) do not belong to the corresponding IFOfile” when attempting to burn. This is currently being looked into by myself and others. For now, just stick with 5.5.8.0 and you’ll be fine.

For the purposes of this example, I am using the DVD “Double Jeopardy”. It works well for this example. You’ll find most DVD’s will work exactly the same way. This tutorial does NOT address complex titles such as seamless branching titles, etc. This is merely to serve as a set reliable method for getting most DVD-9 titles to DVD-5 or as a starting point for more complex titles.


Where do I begin??

First, you want to have a complete backup of everything on your original disk. Use the “Backup” option of SmartRipper or "File Mode" option of DVD Decrypter to copy all of the files to your hard disk. With this example, we see that the largest set (VTS_02) is the one that contains the movie. It is approximately 6.44GB in total size. The VTS_03 set is apparently the trailer since it is only 157MB. The VTS_04 set at 885MB contains the “behind the scenes” extra. You can choose to dump these but we are keeping them for this example.


Chapters and Subtitles

After you have all of your files on the hard disk, you will want to begin by getting the simple things out of the way first. These are chapters and subtitles. Use Chapter Xtractor to load up the VTS_02 set. Make sure the FPS rate is 29970 (It should default to this anyway). Click the “Format” tab. Under “Presets” at the bottom, select “DVDMaestro” You should get something like the following:

$Spruce_IFrame_List

00:00:00:00
00:06:31:06
00:13:25:02
00:20:49:26
00:27:35:01
00:32:29:02
00:40:22:11
00:46:12:00
00:52:36:10
00:58:42:26
01:06:15:21
01:15:18:21
01:21:12:16
01:29:03:16
01:36:16:02
01:40:26:06

Click the “Save Data” button at the bottom and save the file as a DVD Maestro *.CHP file.

Next, you’ll want the subtitles. There are many different ways to do this and many are just as valid as another. I’m going to share with you the way I do them as I have found it to be the most reliable with picking up special characters, etc.

Open SubRip and click on “File...Open VOB’s”. Make sure under the “Action” section, you have selected “Save SubPictures as BMP” and there is a checkmark on “+ TC & Res.”. Make sure the “Last Timecode” is all 0’s and there is no checkmark on “Enable this box if time...” Click the “Open IFO” button and select an IFO from your backed up files. It will then list all VOB’s in that directory in the right-hand window. Place a checkmark on all VOB’s from the movie. Begin with VTS_02_1.VOB in this example. When you’re ready, click the “Start” button. You will get a window asking where to save the files. There will be LOTS of them so don’t go saving them to your desktop or something! I always create a “subs” directory and dump them in there. Choose any filename you like.

 

 

 

 

 

The next window will pop up when the first subtitle is detected. You will want to select the “Cropping” tab. Place a checkmark on “Allow BMP cropping”. Select 720 x 480 for minimum picture width and height, respectively. Width must be a multiple of 8 and height must be a multiple of 2. Horizontal alignment should be Center and Vertical alignment should be Bottom. Click the “Colors” tab and select the "Maestro" preset. Under the “Positioning” tab, make sure you have X and Y on “Keep Original Position”. Click “OK” when you’re ready to go!

Once the subtitles have been ripped, you will be presented with a new window containing the subtitle info. For the Output Format, select the “Spruce DVDMaestro (*.son)” tab and select “30.000 NTSC”. Select your colors and their respective contrast levels. Click the “Convert to this format” button. Next, click “File…Save As” and save the Sonic DVD Creator text file into the same directory you just ripped the subs to.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Damn! All that and we’re still not authoring??

Ok, now you need to use CCE to decrease the size of the main movie so you can fit it on the disc. I’m not going to give detailed use of CCE because there is info all over the place for it here on the site. You can frameserve using Avisynth or VFAPI. Did you remember to create your d2v project file using DVD2AVI? Did you remember to extract your AC3 audio file and use the appropriate DVD2AVI settings? I told you that you needed to understand the basics first! Thought you could skip it all, huh? hehe Anyway, if you’re lost, don’t worry. Read up on using the tools mentioned in this section. There is TONS of info on them here.

When using CCE, I personally use the “Robshot” method. It can be found in the guides here and is listed as “Getting the best out of CCE”. For this example, I found the best setting was a minimum bitrate of 1000, an average of 3500, and a max of 9000. There were one or two small gray areas in the “car goes off the ferry into the water” sequence which never changed, even at the max bitrate. CCE probably just interprets this as a very difficult scene to encode.

In this example, we want our video filesize to be around 3GB. The reason for this is that the total filesize of our menus, extras, and extracted AC3 audio is around 1.2GB or so. You want to make sure you stay below 4.37GB. Keeping my video filesize around 3GB as reported by CCE, resulted in my total project size being just over 4GB. Now a lot of people ask what the best way to determine what will fit on a DVD-R and how to tell how much space they have already used. The best way to do this is to work from the basic measurement the "byte". It also makes it easier to adjust your settings in CCE to fill the disk.

The reason you see 4.7GB on the cover is a marketing thing. It's 4.37GB but it is 4,700,000,000 bytes. Enter this into your Windows calculator and work back from there. Checking the properties of all files but the main VOB's for the movie, we see that there is 1,096,370,176 bytes. Subtract this from your available space. You now see that we are at 3,603,629,824 bytes. Next, you want to check the size of the audio stream you extracted. We see that it is 384,485,376 bytes. Subtract this from your current total and you see that we are down to 3,219,144,448 bytes available. Now the part that is less precise is the subtitles. In my experience, I've found that they end up being compressed approximately 50% from the size they show up as on your hard drive. I don't remember what they were for "Double Jeopardy" but let's assume we see 150,900,736 bytes for the size of the sub BMP's on the hard drive. Divide this by 2 and you have 75,450,368 bytes. Just to give yourself some breathing room, let's subtract 80,000,000 from our current total.

We now have a total of 3,143,694,080 bytes available. You can now run CCE up to this number for your video! Don't forget to leave yourself a little room if you're putting a jacket picture in! (See Authoring section below). I like to play it safe and leave myself a little "breathing room" on the disc, but you can be fairly certain that this is the amount of space you have left for the video file you're about to encode. (Note: I don't have the Double Jeopardy files for the screenshot so this CCE screenshot is just an example of how to gauge your space in bytes.)

 


Almost there!

Next, you will need to perform a “pulldown” on the resulting video file. I found it easiest just to drop the “pulldown.exe” file into my “Windows” directory since there is already a system path to it. This way, you can access the command from any directory prompt. You will need to create two files. I will explain later why. First, use the following command line:


Pulldown project.mpv output.m2v –prog_frames p

then use this one…

Pulldown project.mpv output-drop.m2v –prog_frames p –drop_frame true

 

You will now have a “output.m2v” file and a “output-drop.m2v” file that can be imported into Maestro.

 


Finally! Authoring!

This is really just an intermediate step. We’re not worried about creating a menu, etc. because we just want to reincorporate our project into the original file structure. Change the default “4:3” setting in Maestro to “16:9 PS/LB”. Import all of your media assets into Maestro. Place the “output.m2v” video file on the timeline and your audio file. Next, right-click in the chapter section of the timeline and import your *.CHP chapter list you made earlier.

Once the chapters have been imported, REMOVE the video from the timeline and replace it with the “output-drop.m2v” file. This will allow for proper subtitle import. You MUST NOT import the subtitles when the other video file is on the timeline! They will NEVER be in sync if you do, even if you replace the file with the “output-drop.m2v” file later. You MUST place the “output-drop.m2v” file on the timeline BEFORE importing the subtitles. Right-click on the subtitle line and import your *.SON subtitle file you created earlier.

 

 

 

Something you will need to pay special attention to is a file you may not know about. When you first import your subtitle file and check them, you will see the colors are not what you set in SubRip. SubRip created a new pallete file for you to correct this. In Maestro's subtitle editor, click "Edit Pallete..." then click the "Load" button. You will see an additional file that SubRip created that is *.spf. Load this up and your colors will be correct now.

The next part is optional but I always do it anyway. If you go to the properties of your DVD Maestro project, you will see the option to add “Jacket” pictures. I always do this to add a little extra to my project. Just make sure your file is 720x480 and remember that there is going to be some slight horizontal squeezing on the final TV output. You’ll find something that works.

 

 

 

 

 

 


How the hell do I get it all back together??

Now is the time for the real magic! The ability to incorporate your new files back into the original DVD structure so it will be just like the original with menus and all! The first thing we want to do, in this example, is rename our authored VOB files to VTS_02 instead of VTS_01. They are going to replace the VTS_02 files in the original. DO NOT copy over the authored IFO file! DO NOT copy over the VTS_01_0.VOB file! Remove all of the original VOB files (You MUST leave the IFO file and the VTS_02_0.VOB files!) and copy over the new ones in their place.

NOTE! If you do not understand the previous paragraph as it applies to this example, read it over and over and over again! If you do not do this right, it will not turn out properly! For those that get it, please move on. For those that don’t, I urge you to review more material here on the forum and re-read this tutorial!

After you have copied over the files, you will want to use the IFOUpdate utility. Next to IFOEdit, this tool is the best thing since sliced bread! Thanks Jdobbs! Using it is very straightforward. Enter the full path (including filename) to the original movie IFO, the newly authored IFO (that was created my Maestro), and a location and filename for the backup. Click the “Update IFO” button to update. This corrects all pointers in the IFO such that your chapters now line up correctly with your scene selection menu! Make sure you include copying the colors or your subtitles will not show up correctly!

We’re not QUITE done just yet though. As IFOUpdate will remind you, you need to “Correct VTS Sectors”. Make certain you do not forget this very important step! As you can see in the screenshot, there is now an option to enable IFOUpdate to do this for you automatically! Make sure you put your backup IFO in a safe place in case you need the original again!! I've made the mistake of getting "button happy" and clicked to fast. I ended up overwriting my backup with a corrupted IFO. :( Keep your original until you know you don't need it anymore!

 

 

 

You can now burn these files to DVD and you will have a DVD-5 that now looks and behaves exactly as the original DVD-9 did!

I would like to personally thank Jdobbs for all his work on IFOUpdate and his assistance in the past. I would also like to thank Derrow for his hard work on IFOEdit and everyone else who created utilities that I listed in this guide. Last, but not least, I would like to thank Doom9 for providing us with a wonderful forum where we can share our ideas! Thanks everyone!