Question: Best way to merge movies with the 9 VOB limit in mind?

John_Qyoo_Public

I primarily use DVDRemake to reauthor my DVDs.

I'm trying to figure out how to merge two-disc movies into a single movie on my hard drive so they play as a single movie, while preserving menus of the first disc. For example, right now I have Kingdom of Heaven Director's cut, both discs, sitting on my hard drive. I followed DVDRemake tutorial on the subject but DVDRemake choked because of the 9 VOB limit. I read a few threads here and there but nothing has helped. I tried merging VOB files with DOS command copy /b x.vob + y.vob xy.vob but the joined files wouldn't open with DVDRemake (they worked fine in PowerDVD but I need DVDRemake to open them so I can merge the discs). Is there a way I can get around the 9 VOB limit in DVDRemake, or merge the VOBs in such a way that DVDRemake can open them?

Or maybe there's a ripper that can rip the discs so the VOBs are combined into a larger size, but still have the output acceptable to DVDRemake? I use DVDDexxxxxxx but it doesn't seem to have a way to do this in file mode. IFO mode will do it but I've never used IFO mode and I don't know how to get IFO mode to rip the whole disc, menus and all; IFO mode seems to want to only copy the main movie.

I know I can use something like DVDShrink to just merge the movies from both discs, without menus, but I'd like to use DVDRemake for a few reasons, mostly because I'd like to keep the menus, and the greater control allowed by DVDRemake.

I would have posted this in the DVDRemake forum but I don't care what software is used as long as I can accomplish all goals:

1) Keep as much as possible of the original DVD structure intact
2) Remove annoyances (legalese and such)
3) Remove particulars of two-disc format (Overture block, Intermission block, etc.).
4) Merge movies as seamlessly as DVDRemake.

Thanks very much for reading

P.S., ideally it would be nice to be able to somehow get the scene selection menu of disc 2 onto the final merged product. Not a must-have, but it would be cool, if someone had a suggestion.

John_Qyoo_Public

Okay, sorry, I downloaded VOBMerge (VM) just after posting this and it worked flawlessly with DVDRemake (DR).

I had to experiment with several methods before I figured out how to make it work. Eventually I realized that DR was reporting more than 9 VOBs because it was splitting them back to 1gig when exporting, and that I could probably wait until the final step to use VM as PowerDVD opened the files just fine after a I merged and renamed the VOBs. Here's how I did it:

1) Use VM to merge VOBs. DR choked for me if I merged more than two 1g VOBs.

2) open first disc in DR, then open second disc.
3) go to second disc project, open tree to PGC of main movie; right click it and select copy PGC.
4) go to first disc project, open tree to PGC of main movie; right click it and select append PGC.
5) edit if necessary (in my case, I hid the Overture and Intermission blocks) and export.

6) Use VM to re-merge the VOBs, as DVDRemake splits them

Next time, I'll try it without step 1. I suppose I could also have just re-ripped the DVDs with file splitting turned off.

If anyone wants to suggest how I can include that scene selection menu from the second disc I'm all ears, but I doubt I want to get into that.

t0nee1

Maybe give DVDFab a spin...

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