Burning Multiple Discs in DVD Studio Pro

Today I was burning off a handful of copies of a DVD for a client when someone asked what I was doing since they "hadn't seen that before" in DVD Studio pro.

There are two basic ways to burn multiple copies of a DVD project in DVD Studio Pro.

1. If you only need to burn off a few copies, say less than 10, I usually get everything ready to burn and then hit Shift + Command + F to Burn a disc, test it then proceed if nothing goes wrong.

See, once you Burn off a test disc you've "Built" it, now all you need to do is "Format" it which really means burn off the Built project to a disc. There's no need to hit Burn again because that just rebuilds the disc and wastes time. So...after the initial test Build-n-Burn…

Hit Command + F for Format.

Pop in a blank disk.

Hit Return.

It's quicker than building each time and if there are only a handful of discs to burn - like I said, less than 10 it's not a bad way to go.

2. If you need to burn off many copies (but less than what a dedicated disc copier would be needed for) in DVD Studio Pro hit Command + F (this is after your test burn) and at the bottom of the Build/Format window change Output Device to Hard Drive and tell it where you'd like a disc image of your project saved.

Hit Okay.

After a bit you'll have a disc image of your project.

Launch Disk Utility or Toast and set it to multiple copies and that's about it.

MacX DVD Ripper Is Now Free

...for personal use.

The announcement is here.

"MacX DVD Ripper Mac Free Edition is all-in-one free DVD ripper for Mac to backup and rip DVDs to MOV, MP4, FLV, MPEG, iTunes for free on Mac OS.

MacX DVD Ripper Mac Free Edition is a free DVD ripper software for Mac users to backup and rip DVD movies (including commercial DVDs) to MOV, MP4, MPEG, FLV, iTunes video for free, minus all the copy protections that widely used in recently DVD movies, such as CSS encryption, Sony ARccOS, region protection, UOPs, APS, even the Disney DVD movies copy protection. It provides stable and useful solution for you to free rip DVD and watch target videos by QuickTime Player on Mac, edit output videos by iMovie, upload converted videos to YouTube, or enjoy favorite DVD videos on portable devices."

What capabilities does the paid version have that the free version doesn't? Apparently ripping directly to AppleTV, PSP, iPhone specific formats and formatting, but I actually haven't tried it yet.

Hopefully this will simplify this process, and help eliminate messes like this.

Improperly Ripped DVD's

There are two errors you may see when you try and play an improperly ripped DVD, an improperly ripped DVD disc image or an improperly ripped VIDEO_TS folder with Apple's DVD Player .app.

1. "There was a problem opening the media. The media type is not supported."

2. "DVD Player encountered an error it could not recover from The disc copy protection could not be verified. The disc cannot be played." (yes it's missing a period in the actual alert box)

The cause of these errors in my case is a client tried to rip one of their companies DVD's which has copy protection and didn't do it correctly. 

Since nothing really surprises me anymore I wasn't alarmed at all (just assumed it wouldn't work) when the DVD the client handed me (a DVD-R) had a .dmg of the DVD they were supposed to give me.

Stranger things have happened. So, On the DVD-R is a rip of the DVD they want me to pull footage from in the form of a .dmg file.

I mount the .dmg and even let it verify and see that it is at least a UDF volume, then, as expected, DVD Player fails to launch. It will play the intro company logos and things then tosses up error #2 up there when it tries to play the menu track.

I'm guessing one of three things happened.

1. They literally made a .dmg from their retail DVD without using a proper ripping tool.

2. They copied the VIDEO_TS folder from a retail disc to their desktop, then used something like Toast to burn it. Again, without using a proper ripping tool.

3. Ripped the DVD somehow and used some app to re-compress it to a DVD-5. And of course never tested the thing.

I'd place my money on #1 this time.

The only option to play it quickly is VLC at this point.

Calling the client (the actual person who contacted me to get this quickie job done for them, btw) and asking "This DVD image you gave me has issues playing. Any idea if I can get a retail version from you?" gets me this pass-the-buck-response, "I wouldn't know. Let me forward you." CLICK then an answering machine for their "media department".

Just for fun I tried copying the VIDEO_TS folder to my desktop and then playing it with DVD Player .app but it was wasn't happening. If I cared just a little bit more I would try ripping the mounted .dmg but I don't.

Luckily I can still use this method to get the few tiny clips they want for their project.

The AUDIO_TS Folder or Why I didn't sleep last night.

Clients never cease to amaze me. Yesterday I burned off a DVD Review copy for a client and they couldn't play it. Ok, I said to myself, no biggie it was probably a finicky player which thought it had bad disc or bad burn, which happens. I asked them if they tried the backup disc I had also sent along.

"Oh yeah, that one wouldn't play either." At least they were nice about it.

Potential problems filtered though my head. I checked the file structure of the image I kept just in case and it seemed okay; I had tested the DVDs (both of 'em) on a stand-alone player here before sending them and both worked, so I was stumped. A few more rounds on the phone and just out of pure curiosity I asked what they were trying to play it on. "The lobby dvd thing there." Okay, almost helpful. So I decided to ask the exact model number of the player they were using mumbling something about "firmware" and pretending to be interested in some obscure facet of DVD Player technology they couldn't possibly understand.

Googling the model number of this player revealed it was older than some stromatolites which inexorably started me falling down the WikiHole™ until I discovered this little tidbit of info:

The AUDIO_TS folder is there for backwards compatibility with older-than-dirt DVD Players even though it's used for DVD Audio Discs (sometimes called DVD-A discs) which hardly anyone one makes anymore.

Wha? Yup, their DVD Player was so old that it required an AUDIO_TS folder on a video only DVD. Silly me had not included one because I had never needed one before in the history of me burning DVDs for clients.

So lesson here is to really never underestimate client's hardware.

If they have any:

"Yeah all of our employee laptops have DVD players in their laptops."

Oh, okay great, I'll make 1000 copies for you guys by the end of next week."

 NEXT WEEK.

"No those are CD-ROM drives, not DVD Players in your employee laptops. Where's my check?"

Burning VIDEO_TS folders from Disk Utility

I haven't had a problem that I recall using this method but "Dewshi" over at Macosxhints.com commented that sometimes the files are in the wrong order which explains why burning a VIDEO_TS folder in Disk Utility will result in a DVD that will play on a computer but not on a standard stand-alone DVD player.

I'm curious to test it out though and see if this does happen depending on thy way a VIDEO_TS folder is burned.

The reason a DVD player is unable to recognise the disk is that it requires the files in the VIDEO_TS to be physically in the correct order, in particular the VIDEO_TS.IFO file should come first. When you insert a disk into a DVD player it scans the first few sectors looking for this file which contains a list of sector offsets to find the title sets on the DVD. If the DVD player can’t find the IFO file or finds another file first it generally gives up.

Unfortunately, alphabetically the file “VIDEO_TS.BUP” comes first and the mac writes this file first when burning a plain data disk. A computer DVD player, on the other hand, understands the file system on the disk and can therefore find any file it wants with out having to know the offset values. That’s why the mac can play the disk OK, but not a DVD player.

It is also important that the VOB files are in the correct order as a DVD player just plays the data it finds, ignoring file boundaries, until it reaches the end. In fact a DVD player doesn’t even understand files and only uses sector offsets to find data.

HERE’S AN EXAMPLE OF A CORRECT VIDEO_TS FOLDER:

VIDEO_TS.IFO
VIDEO_TS.VOB
VIDEO_TS.BUP
VTS_01_0.IFO
VTS_01_0.VOB
VTS_01_1.VOB
VTS_01_2.VOB
VTS_01_0.BUP
VTS_02_0.IFO
VTS_02_0.VOB
VTS_02_1.VOB
VTS_02_0.BUP

So the problem is to structure the files in the required order on the written disk, and not just alphabetically. I’ve experimented with various disc images & software tools (e.g Burn), with no success. How do you burn a disk with files in a certain order?

MakeMKV & tsMuxer

If you're looking for a way to rip footage from discs clients insist on handing you, you may want to have a look at MakeMKV. MakeMKV basically rips DVDs, Blu-Ray into .mkv files and also streams them to many players. It's free while it's in beta.

Another converter to check out is the FREE tsMuxeR. SmartLabs tsMuxeR – the software utility to create TS and M2TS files for IP broadcasting as well as for viewing at hardware video players (i.e., Dune HD Ultra, Sony Playstation3 and others).

Ripping just Audio from DVDs

Mac OS X Hints has an interesting post about how to rip just the audio from DVDs. I've only really had to do this a couple of time, but when I get a chance I'm going to test out some new methods.

They cite this method, which uses Mac The Ripper to rip the AC3 audio and then ffmpegx to transcode it to mp3, but the apps are a bit long in the tooth (ffmpegx's last update was January 26th 2008) or a bit tricky to get a copy of a recent version.

An alternate to ffmpegx is MAC3dec but that's a bit of an old app as well. Apparently last updated on August 26th 2004.

Mpeg Streamclip is probably the best way to go that I've seen so far.

(Yes there's OSex but it's pretty old.)