GNOMEBaker + Copy DVD = damaged master

[Hlingler]

Tuesday was my first attempt to copy a DVD. I had never tried this before. This DVD is home-made - it's an edited copy of a TV news broadcast that my cousin produced (she's a TV news producer), so this is her "resume." I previewed it on VCL, and found about 17 minutes of video. The contents of (the first copy of) the DVD:

[Vince@presario ~]$ ls -lR /media/disk
/media/disk:
total 2
dr-xr-xr-x 1 root root 2048 Jan  1  2005 video_ts

/media/disk/video_ts:
total 4050748
-r-xr-xr-x 1 root root      12288 Jan  1  2005 video_ts.bup
-r-xr-xr-x 1 root root      12288 Jan  1  2005 video_ts.ifo
-r-xr-xr-x 1 root root      61440 Jan  1  2005 video_ts.vob
-r-xr-xr-x 1 root root      47104 Jan  1  2005 vts_01_0.bup
-r-xr-xr-x 1 root root      47104 Jan  1  2005 vts_01_0.ifo
-r-xr-xr-x 1 root root 1065353216 Jan  1  2005 vts_01_1.vob
-r-xr-xr-x 1 root root 1065353216 Jan  1  2005 vts_01_2.vob
-r-xr-xr-x 1 root root 1065353216 Jan  1  2005 vts_01_3.vob
-r-xr-xr-x 1 root root  951726080 Jan  1  2005 vts_01_4.vob
[Vince@presario ~]$

Not wishing to reboot to Windoze for this task, and confident of both Linux and my own (ahem...) skills, I chose GNOMEBaker as the tool to use. After checking out GNOMEBaker and setting up it's options, I merrily instructed it to copy the DVD. All seemed to go well, until it reached a section of the disk that it had trouble reading, but after chewing on it for a while, GNOMEBaker returned an "okey-dokey", spit out the DVD, and informed me to insert a blank DVD. The burn process proceeded without error and finished, and I was delighted to see that the copy appeared to contain all of the files of the original, and it played through on VLC ok. So I repeated the copy process five times before quiting for the night.

This is where the meltdown happened.

Next morning when I resumed, GNOMEBaker informed me that the master DVD contained no readable data. Loading this master now results in a flood of error messages to /var/log/messages. Konqueror opens to a blank disk. I believe that what happened was: the fifth copy did not burn fully/correctly, even though there were no burn errors reported. On the next try, rather than waiting for me to insert a blank, GNOMEBaker sucked the master back into the drive and attempted to write to it, but failed. I still have four (apparently) good copies to work with, so I retried the copy process using the first copy as the new master, but so far, any further copies are incomplete and do not play through on VLC, even though the burn process succeeds. I also tried rebooting to Windoze and using both Sonic and MCE to copy, but they both fail after wasting many blanks. I also lost the temporary image when I rebooted.

So, my questions are:

• Is there any way to recover/restore the original master DVD, or is it now recyclable trash?
• Any suggestions on how to get more good copies (I need 10) using the existing copies? Any settings that I could adjust to get a better read? Perhaps another program that will be better able to read the data?

I am now eating Humble Pie. Any help will be greatly appreciated.

Thanx,
Vince

P.S. The drive is a LightScribe CD/DVD±RW. The master DVD is completely unlabeled, but the desktop icon (used to) show "Samsung UDF Volume". Blanks are Sony DVD-R. Copies display same desktop icon/info as original.

[buddha]

It might be possible to reconstruct an "original" DVD but I'm not positive. I have some knowledge of video DVD images and files, so here goes.

First off, a Video DVD is different than a Data DVD. Just having the same files is not enough for a Video DVD to be compliant. To be compliant with the DVD Video standard, a Video DVD must have the following directories: AUDIO_TS and VIDEO_TS. All caps is mandatory.

Video DVDs must have certain files written in a specific order so standalone DVD players can always find them. It appears to me that GnomeBaker is not fully aware of how to copy Video DVDs. I would rate k3b as having a better chance of working properly, but even then, I would have suggested you started by making an exact ISO image copy on disk of the original DVD before starting to make any copies.

Since that didn't happen, we can try to reconstruct a good Video DVD from the first copy. In your file listing, you show lowercase file names which is probably just an artifact of the default options the DVD was automounted with.

To create a proper Video DVD structure from VOB, IFO, and BUP files, you need to create the proper directory structure first, namely the AUDIO_TS and VIDEO_TS as said before. Put all the V* files in the VIDEO_TS directory.

Then to create an ISO image of the Video DVD you want, use the mkisofs command. Insert your own filenames and paths in a command like this:

mkisofs -v -V "Title of DVD" -dvd-video -o DVD.iso DVD_dir

where DVD_dir is the directory containing the AUDIO_TS and VIDEO_TS directories.

Once you have the new DVD.iso Video DVD image, you can test play the iso image directly with vlc or xine. If the image is good, any program that can burn ISO images should then work fine to make good copies.

There's a lot more to this, but that ought to get you started if you still need to fix this.

[Hlingler]

buddha: First, thanx for responding.

Before I proceed, I want to make sure that I understand your instructions correctly. You said "...you need to create the proper directory structure first, namely the AUDIO_TS and VIDEO_TS...". So, I should create a folder, say ~/HUMBLE_PIE, and two sub-folders, ~/HUMBLE_PIE/AUDIO_TS and ~/HUMBLE_PIE/VIDEO_TS, correct? Then, "Put all the V* files in the VIDEO_TS directory." I assume that you mean that I should copy the *.v* files from the (first good copy of) DVD to ~/HUMBLE_PIE/VIDEO_TS? But then, where do I copy the *.bup and *.iso files to? To the ~/HUMBLE_PIE directory? The AUDIO_TS folder will be empty. If that is all correct, then the final command would be:

mkisofs -v -V "Humble Pie" -dvd-video -o HUMBLE_PIE.iso ~/HUMBLE_PIE

Also, does any of this need to be done as root user?

BTW, I am almost certain that the original master did not have all-uppercase filenames, and I am absolutely positive that there was no audio_ts folder. So maybe it was never intended to be played on a DVD player. Nevertheless, I need more good copies, so I want to try your suggestions.

Thanx again for your time and help,
Vince

[buddha]

None of this needs to be done as root.

You are on the right track with the directory structure. The top-level directory, your "HUMBLE_PIE" does not need to be all caps, but AUDIO_TS and VIDEO_TS and all files below need to be in all caps. As I said before, depending on mount options, they may not have shown up that way, BUT to make a fully compliant and valid DVD Video folder structure, they need to be in all caps.

In the VIDEO_TS folder, put all the *.vob, *.ifo, *.bup files from your first good copy. In other words, everything that was in the video_ts folder from the first good copy. Change all the file names to all caps. Now, the mkisofs command may accept lower case filenames as input, but the Video DVD standard is very clear that the resulting UDF file system (which is what a Video DVD uses) should have all caps filenames.

Yes, the AUDIO_TS directory will be empty. For a standard Video DVD, ALL files are in the VIDEO_TS directory.

Regarding whether your original DVD had the correct structure for a Video DVD, some software players are more forgiving and will play stuff that may not be fully compliant with the Video DVD standard. I'm just telling you what the standard requires. For example, xine will play a video_ts folder if you give it the right MRL, but that doesn't mean the video_ts folder complies with the Video DVD standard. The goal is to make a standard DVD so you can play it on most DVD players, right?

Your mkisofs line looks good to me.

[Hlingler]

buddha: Thanx again for your time and help with this problem.

I followed your directions. Unfortunately, I didn't get very far because three of the files (vts_01_0.bup, vts_01_3.vob, vts_01_4.vob) were unreadable. A simple copy-and-paste gave a "cannot read" error of some kind, and a CLI cp gave an "I/O error". I suspect, but cannot prove, that these files were corrupt from the start.

However...

I installed k3b (plus extras and debug packages), and it was able to both generate an .iso image and usable copies - not without error, it wasted a couple blanks along the way. But I got ten copies that will all play through the entire 18 minutes of video on VLC. They may or may not work on a regular DVD player, but what I've got is good enough for now.

Again, many Thanx and Regards,
Vince

[buddha]

You are quite welcome. Glad to hear you were able to get some workable copies.

Just a few extra thoughts. I forgot to point out a great webpage that describes the Video DVD files:

http://stream.uen.org/medsol/dvd/pag...structure.html

I don't know how your original DVD was authored, but it sounds like it may not have been entirely correct in the first place. The unreadable .bup file on the copy is a bit suspicious, but .bup files are just backups of .ifo files. No, the really suspect part is the total size of the VOB files, almost 4GB. Since you said there are only 18min of footage, it doesn't add up. For a Video DVD-R, you should be able to get about 1 hour of maximum bitrate DVD quality footage on a Video DVD, which, just like data DVDs can hold a maximum of 4.7 GB. So the fact that the last two .vob files were corrupt makes me wonder if they were ever really valid.

BTW, you can play valid vob files directly with mplayer, xine, or vlc.