How to get raw TS from DVD with bad sector?
 

Hi all.

I have a DVD video (it's of a wedding) that someone gave me. They warned me in advance that part of the speech is corrupt and I can just delete it.

Now when I copy the VOBs off the DVD, that part is indeed corrupted to view, but the actual stream looks fine when I try and check for bad sectors using FFMPEG. I suspect the DVD drive might be correcting these on the fly and that's causing this?

Its been a long time since I had to use physical discs, so grabbed my cheapo USB DVD drive and pulled the VOBs off using that.

I did try using a tool called "ISO Buster" which supposedly can request the files off the DVD as is, but it didn't make any difference. The sections are still corrupted to playback.

What are my actual avenues here to get this resolved (if any)? I'm going to have a hunt around the office on Monday to see if we have any DVD drives lying around to see if they have a better chance of grabbing the files.

The disc itself doesn't appear badly damaged and I have tried some light scratch repair which made no difference.

If it is the drive that's adding something to these files to try and ensure the stream isn't corrupted, my goal would be to grab the damaged video stream off the disc so I can try and repair it manually.

Is the data corrupt
- before the DVD was authrored?
- or because the DVD-Video is corrupted?

If the former, you're screwed.
If the latter, how does it rip with DVD Puzzle? ISO Puzzle?

Note: never just copy VOB files. Those are not videos, those a Video OBject files.
video + audio + nav data

And DVD-Video is program streams (PS), not transport streams (TS).

The actual visual corruption to me looks like DV corruption, like you'd get with a camcorder, so it's quite possible it's not actually the DVD that's broken, but the original video itself. However I'd like to try and imagine that someone would have caught this years ago when the video was first produced.

I can't find anything on the web called DVD puzzle?

EDIT: I did find an ISO puzzle which might be the same tool? It just errors out after 35 errors.

Yes, ISO Puzzle is it. :congrats:

Yeah, I actually managed to get rid of any DVD reading errors from more aggressive cleaning.

The artifacts are still there and I'm fairly confident that this isn't a DVD type error. What do you think:

That's upstream DV data corruption. That's not how DVD artifacts present, nor how MPEG artifacts present. That's very typical for corrupt DV.

The DV corruption happened at:
- recording camera, or
- playback camera/deck, or
- the tape itself was damaged

Very tell-tale that this was DV at some point. (Not DVD, but DV.)

Yes it looks like classic DV dirty or damaged tape head (one of the two heads), at either record or playback stage.

Is the original camera tape still available? If so, a good playback on a deck or camera in excellent condition (not as easy to come by these days as 10 years ago) might reveal pristine picture and sound. Just be careful. These tiny tapes are easy to damage just by playing in a faulty player.

Try DVDVob2Mpg, it does a better job of ripping the DVD than just copying the VOB files, renaming them to MPG, and hoping for the best.
https://www.dvdvobtompg.com/

What is wrong with VOB? It is just Mpeg2 container.

That is not correct.

VOB is a Video OBject file.
And the IFO is the InFOmation file to control the nav data. The IFO is located before the first VOB of the set.
The BUP is the BackUP of the IFO, in case the IFO is damaged. The BUP is located after the VOB set on the UDF burned disc file structure. UDF allows manual placement of file location on burned media.

- "DVD" is just a "digital versatile disc" (not a "digital video disc")
- "DVD-Video" is the format that most people simply refer to as a DVD.

DVD-Video has a specific structure of numbered files,

- VOB files are not MPEGs.
- VOB is not a container for MPEGs. (MPEG-2 is a self-containerized format.)
- VOB contains MPEG.

Nav data often interferes with the MPEG data, which is why the MPEG-2 video is extracted. The extraction uses the IFO files, as would a DVD-Video player (or "DVD player" to laymen).

Do you understand this better now? :)

Ok, but if we stay away from DVD structure, navigation etc. all miniDVD camcorders (lived short period between miniDV and memory cards, I believe about 2004-2006 with peak at 2005 or something like that) recorded VOB, and common practice was to copy VOB and then convert to something else if needed. VLC plays VOB and most programs do it.

It wasn't common practice. Some people did it, but it was always wrong, and always caused problems. Special software was always needed to extract, be it DVD Decrypter (IFO mode), VOB2MPG, ISO Buster, and others

VLC generally knows about nav data, so it reads through it.

OK, but if you successfully copied VOB file, there are no problems to decode/convert it later. Problem with those miniDVD now is many of them are degraded (heat etc. who knows), so even with special programs and various DVD drives is impossible to recover them. I have 2 miniDVD camcorders with DL support, but you never know - trying to get out something from those miniDVD will be succesful or not.

If you have the full "title set" (VOB, IFO, BUP), then not an issue -- though sometimes you have to re-ISO it. Not re-burn, just recreate the ISO. The read software can be picky.

If just the VOB, then extraction gets harder. It's been years since I had to extract MPEG out of orphaned VOB files, but I think VideoReDo (now defunct) could. I know Womble could not. I know TMPGEnc could not. I'd have to spin up the VM of my 2000s system, and look around at the install software.

Yeah, that was exactly my thinking. I thought that considering I had gone this far and the DVD had errors I might as well triple check if fixing those would help.

Thanks to others that replied as well.

For anyone else who finds this thread in the future, ISO puzzle will read the disc without auto-correcting errors (you do need a dll from an old version of Nero for it to work that's not included).

I did end up switching to something called DVDisaster, which is basically the same thing, but I preferred the UI and options.

I did fix the DVD with something I pulled out from my old days of trying to play scratched Playstation games! Toothpaste!
This got the disc read perfectly without errors, but as assumed, the corruption is still there. I did make a fresh copy of the DVD so the original owner at least has a fresh working copy of the DVD now as well.

Also, on getting mpg data from VOBs directly or from broken discs, ISObuster has that option.

Hitachi had some DVD/HDD combo camcorders which strangely still recorded VOB files even if you used the hard drive, but I guess the idea was that would make the videos easy to burn to DVDs later.

I do remember some nav-less VOBs existing, mostly for consumer DVD recorders and DVD cameras. I no longer recall which those were, it's now bee decades.

- If the DVDs have chapters, they have nav data.
- If it's chapter-less, there may be no in-stream nav data, just header and tail, and those can probably be easily re-streamed to "container-less" (not VOB) into native MPEG container. It's actually just extracted, I believe the MPEG containerization still exists within the VOB.

This is concepts from my studio days, and I may never forget it. I sometimes feel time-locked with distribution format knowledge. It feels both like yesterday, and like the decades ago it really was. It's now been over a decade since my MS "stroke" forced my exit from that part of the industry.

Cameras. Those mini DVD camcorders. Sometimes there are unfinalized DVD what can be read by camcorders or special programs + special drive (there was one mini DVD recegnized by Plextor PX-716 and there was another one recognized only by old Sony. I really do not know it depend on phases of the moon or something else), sometimes they are not recognized or recognized as blank. And there are still people around who stores their video in those original mini DVD and believe it is forever. Sometimes data can be (at least partially) extracted, but those unfinalized mini DVD what was improperly stored are dead.

VideoReDo's "Quick stream fix" can recover an orphaned VOB file. Too bad its creator passed away and the company closed up shop. I'm lucky I bought and registered my copy while it was still a going concern.

Finalized or not, it’s worth trying to dump it using CleanRip if you have a Wii. CleanRip has no sense of what the disc actually is or what files are; it dumps whatever raw hexes the laser sees. Any absolutely unreadable (or blank, at the end of the file) parts will be filled in with hex 55 or U rather than showing any error messages.