Hey guys. I am quite familiar with backing up DVD's, however when it comes to editing I am very lost. What I want to do is take a DVD, edit some obscene parts out (for the sake of younger viewers in the house), and put it back on a DVD to be played in a standard DVD player. I purchased Womble because I read it was good software to do this, but I have no idea what I am doing. Can anyone help me with this process or at least point me in the right direction? Thanks in advance.

Search for a tutorial for Womble Mpeg Wizard, and to though it. That is the only way to learn... That will get you where you want to be 10 times faster than any alternative (other than getting someone else to do it for you).

Yeah...I did search for a tutorial on this subject. But I really do not know where to begin. I guess first you have to rip the DVD to hard drive and from this you get VOB files. Supposedly the VOB files which make up DVD format are an encoded mixture of audio and video. But they are also a form of Mpeg. So this means you can use Womble to edit them. But when you try to edit them you run into problems because of the way the audio and video are together in the file. So editing the video part would be easy but you may have problems with the audio. This leads to another process you have to go through which is something like re authoring the DVD. It seems like the process only gets more and more complicated the further I research. I would like to eventually learn Womble and become more proficient at video editing. But for now I'm working on understanding Photoshop, so that takes all my free "master a complicated software" time. I know alot of times there will be a quick "how to" tutorial just to get you through. You know...like cliff notes in college. I was really asking if someone knew of a short cut for this particular process. I am not lazy, just very confused.

DVD-Video is basically MPEG2 with the video and audio interleaved together. It's like this to keep the synchronisation constant, and you don't need to separate them in order to edit in MPEG-VW. Reauthoring is the process of putting the edited and finished MPEG2 back again to DVD.

OK here's a basic first-steps:

1. Rip the MPEG2 from DVD by using DVD Decrypter in IFO mode (in the IFO settings have file-splitting set to 'None')
2. Change the file extension of the .VOB to .MPG
3. Fire up MPEG Video Wizard and right-click on the input window
4. Navigate to the file you just ripped and open it.
5. Now you can use the slider to move back and forth through the movie.
6. Set the edit start and end points ('up' and 'down' arrows) and drag the bits you want to keep down onto the timeline. Obviously you don't select and drop the 'obscene' parts you referred to above
7. You should end up with coloured blocks of the video which will be stitched together into one file by the program, when you export.

Why don't you just try it this far and get back.

BTW do you have the MPEG-Video Wizard or the MPEGVW-DVD version?

Do not worry about sound. It gets cut together with video part so there is no sync problem later on.

I will definately try these steps and post the results. Thank you so much for the outline!

I have the MPEG-Video Wizard.

Nick