Odd behavior when shrinking 3 videos to 8.5 DVD

[rsellis]

I have three episodes of a tv documentary that I captured with dmf4. Each episode is 3.3G and an hour long. When I made a DVD project with three episodes each as a menu entry setup for continuous play, I think it created an ISO image that would work. I KNOW that when I changed the project options so that each episode returned to the menu, the 1st episode instead of being 1 hr. was 2 hours with the second hour consisting of a bunch of frozen frames from the end credits of the 1st hour and a repeat of the complete 1st hour of sound. Episodes 2 and 3 were normal, being an hour long and returning to the menu upon completion.

Next, I recoded the 1st episode with VS8 to be only 2.2G long, but my vs8 does not have the ac3 plugin, so the ac3 sound on episode 1 is now only layer 2 stereo. When I replaced the 3.3G episode 1 with this one, it is still over the DVD capacity, but burn with shrink yielded an ISO that would correctly play, but I did not burn it because there were too many compression artifacts from being compressed twice. Interestingly enough both of the ISO's so far were only about 7.3G.

As a third approach I made a project on Sonic MyDVD 6.1 that correctly shrunk the video so that each episode played through the way it should. The only problem is that I have been working with Sonic for several weeks because my copy makes all projects to play through and loop regardless of the preference settings. Now that the VOB's were about 2.7G apiece, I though maybe I could feed them to DMF4 and get a correct ISO to burn to a DVD+R DL (DL media have dropped to <$4 locally but I still do not want to experiment by making coasters). I believe I fed them to Videoredo to rerender them as MPG (VRD has an option to make Ulead compliant MPEGS). When I fed the MPEGS to DMF4, I did not need to shrink the contents to get an acceptable size ISO, but it stil acted like the one where DMF4 had done the shrinking, and made another ISO that had the screwy 1st episode with the extra hour, but in which episodes 2 and 3 played normally.

I enjoy torture as much as the next guy, but I am really getting frustrated with this project, since I cannot achieve my desired result with either DMF4 (latest update) or Sonic MyDVD 6.1.

If DMF4 would let me create an ISO of arbitrary size that I could then shrink to 8.5 with DVD Shrink, then I would be happy. DMF4 will let me create an ISO of over 4.7G without setting it up for DL, so I just wish it would do the same for sizes larger than DL as well.

Any help or similar experiences?


Stew Ellis - Prof. of Liberal Studies