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Edit > Extract Video from a Professional DVD
Article last updated March 13, 2009
At some point in
time, many find it necessary to edit or correct problems on
an already-existing DVD.
There are many reasons a person would want to extract
content from a disc:
- Maybe the
bit-rates are too high, and the multi-disc collection could
be merged onto less discs?
- Maybe the audio was encoded as non-compliant MP2 and you
need it as PCM or AC3?
- Maybe the audio and/or video needs restoration work?
- Maybe the edits are bad, and you can fix it?
- Maybe the disc had assets authored out of order, and you
want to fix it?
- Or maybe you simply wanted to grab some footage for another
project?
This guide
requires DVD Decryptor and VOB Edit, both free tools.
It will show you how to
extract the video and audio files from the DVD, and then
re-author it to a new disc with new menus, maybe even shrink
it after combining several discs.
Because the sources and authoring methods of the DVD are
largely unknown, this guide takes a thorough and safe
approach to the extraction. While some people may choose
to copy VOBs or simply use an "IFO rip" to extract
the PGCs, those are sloppy methods that often result in
problems during editing and/or authoring.
Decompile
the disc
Be it a homemade or
professionally produced disc, load it in DVD Decrypter. Go into IFO MODE.
Notice the PGC list. These are your video files. You've
got to figure out on your own which PGC goes with which
item. In this example, PGC 1 is the movie (note the 1:39
time stamp) and the others are extras.
Go to Stream Processing. Enable the processing and
select the DEMUX option. Also you can choose what you want.
In this example, I chose to dump the non-English language
tracks and subtitles.
Files. After decrypting the PGC (PGC 2 was used in this
example), you'll find the files on your hard drive. You can
delete the IFO and TXT files, as they are not needed. What
you have left is the M2V video files and the VOB containing
the audio.
Extracting the audio. Close DVD Decryptor and open VOB
Edit. At the bottom right press the OPEN button and go open
the VOB file. A list of information will appear on the
left-half window. Next click the DEMUX button on the bottom
near the OPEN button.
In the window above that opens from pressing DEMUX, select
the audio type that you are extracting. This must be figured
out on your own, thought the left-half window information
normally says PCM Audio Pack or AC-3 Audio Pack in the audio
information. If there are multiple audio streams, then be
sure to tick the "demux all audio streams" option.
This program can also be used to extract video and audio
from VOB files already on your hard drive, though I prefer
the DVD Decrypter method as it is more accurate and can
detect seperate PGC within the same VOB automatically.
You now have your AUDIO and VIDEO files successfully
extracted on your hard drive and ready for further use.
Re-Encode /
Re-Author / Re-Burn / Merge
This is where this guide ends. Now that you have
successfully extracted the video and audio files, you can
re-encode as wanted, or even just re-author and then
re-burn.
For editing, Womble MPEG Video Wizard is suggested. A
very thorough video-based guide is available for Premium
Members to watch in the digitalFAQ Support Forum.
For authoring, TMPGEnc DVD Author or TMPGEn Authoring
Works are excellent easy-to-use choices. For slightly more
advanced authoring, consider Ulead DVD Workshop 2 (no longer
sold by Ulead directly, but still available online).
For burning, use ImgBurn, after you have authored.
This freeware DVD-compliant tool is easily the best burning
software available, beating out most commercial options.
Merging discs: the 'Shrink' trick. This method is also useful for
compressing several discs onto one disc.
Example: There were three old discs that had PCM audio, were
only 3GB in size, and the video files were cartoons with 9.8
CBR MPEG-2 bit-rates. It was complete overkill and a waste
of space. I took the audio and re-encoded to AC3 with
Besweet. I then made new menus (which actually looked better
than the ones on the source discs) and authored a project to
the hard drive that was about 7GB in size. I then used DVD
Shrink 3 Beta 5 in Deep Analysis mode and shrunk the 7GB
folder to a 4.38GB suitable for burning. The final product
looked as perfect as the original, but at 1/3rd the original
size in terms of discs. Excessively long re-encodes were not
needed. This is not always going to lead to high quality,
but in this example, it did.
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