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App for ripping a DVD and having a navigable video (chapters, menus, submenus)

Yassan

Yassan

macrumors newbie
Original poster
Mar 28, 2019
16
3
Germany
Hi everybody.

A friend bought a QiGong course on DVD, and would like to watch it on her Android tablet. So she asked me to help her with this.

The DVD structure is a bit weird. When I open it with VLC (as DVD video disc), it starts with a menu with many elements, each of which goes to a rich submenu (but the first element of the main menu, which is a straight “Play all”), with maybe 25 chapters in total. From the Finder, the VIDEO_TS folder shows 69 files.

To give an idea:
VIDEO_TS.BUP
VIDEO_TS.IFO
VIDEO_TS.VOB
VTS_01_0.BUP
VTS_01_0.IFO
VTS_01_0.VOB
VTS_01_1.VOB
VTS_02_0.BUP
VTS_02_0.IFO
VTS_02_0.VOB
VTS_02_1.VOB
…
VTS_16_0.BUP
VTS_16_0.IFO
VTS_16_0.VOB
VTS_16_1.VOB

All the *_0.VOB files seem to be just a black screen of 0 secs duration. Many other . VOB files last just a few seconds.

Since it is a course, my friend would like to be able to jump to each chapter without having to scrub madly.

The course is made of two DVDs, and I assume that the structure of the second one is similar to the first.

Do you know an app that can convert the DVD into MOV or MKV or whatever with a navigable Structure?
(Since she paid good money for the course, she would be ready to pay something also for the app, so it doesn’t have to be for free)

Thank you in advance.
 
I use HandBrake sometimes but, when I import this DVD, it doubles or triples all .VOB files and sees them as single titles of one chapter each. At that point I didn't even try the actual conversion.
In the end I decided to use HandBrake anyway, but feeding it with the single .VOB files. I will see how to proceed, if to merge them all together and make a .cue file for VLC or to separate the files per chapter and use the VLC playlist to play them all one after the other or individually.
 
I made a .ISO image of the DVD and copied that on the tablet. I could only watch the longest title and had no access to the menus. Also fast forward and skip didn't work.
Now I tried with the VIDEO_TS folder alone, and for some reason VLC doesn't even see the folder (it is the same folder where the .ISO image was...). When I try to open a .VOB file from the file explorer (passing it on to VLC), it comes to a black screen with the play button, and when I press the play button I get an error about nothing to handle... It's getting weirder and weirder... :rolleyes:
 
I've played with this kind of thing a little over the years. The VIDEO_TS format seems like one of those things which is intently meant as a final distribution format, where everything is melded and encoded together, like firing a piece of pottery. Reverting it to its components, while it's kind of been achieved with things like Handbrake, is similarly difficult. (If some conversion app is to provide all the features the DVD had, like menus and subtitles and everything, then the automated process would have to be one of reverse-engineering followed by some form of re-engineering.)

One the Mac, I'm used to just opening VIDEO_TS files with the DVD Player app (which is happily still supported, if minimally). I don't know whether Android has a DVD Player-type app which is designed to interpret and play VIDEO_TS folder contents without reverse-engineering them at all, but that's probably what I'd have started by looking for.
 
Last edited:
bogdanw said:
I meant with VLC.
Click to expand...
Sorry for the delay, strong cold hitting.
VLC om Mac has no problems.
VLC on Android does nothing; it goes back to a black screen with a "Play" icon, but tapping the icon doesn't play anything...

In the end I found some kind of working solution.
For the whole DVD, Handbrake was showing 60 titles; besides the 2 longest ones (of 42 min and 40 min respectively), which appeared in the Title drop-down menu once each, all the other titles appeared 4 times each (maybe a couple of them appeared only 3 times), like this:
1 - 00:02:21
2 - 00:02:21
3 - 00:04:01
4 - 00:04:01
5 - 00:04:01
6 - 00:01:24
7 - 00:01:24
8 - 00:01:24
...
60 - 00:00:12

As you can see, sometimes they were grouped together but not always...
Anyway I managed to find out all the copies and keep only one of each. Then I changed the output file name for each of the 15 selected files (Handbrake was proposing the same file name for all of them; of course they would have overwritten each other) so that they were chronologically ordered (the order of the titles showed by Handbrake had nothing to do with the sequence they are played when watching the DVD).

For the 3 titles which had chapters, I used MetaZ to give the chapters meaningful names (instead of "Chapter 1", "Chapter 2", "Chapter 3"...), after Handbrake converted the files to .mp4. I believe I could have done this into Handbrake before exporting, but I wanted to be sure to have usable files, before to put more time in them.

Finally, I put all the 15 titles in a VLC .m3u playlist, which VLC for Android could also read, and delivered a folder with the 15 .mp4 files and the .m3u playlist, plus instructions on how to watch it.

Many thanks, especially to bogdanw, for the contributions.
Hope my english is understandable.
 
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