Hi
I recently bought a Samsung DVD-VR330 DVD/VHS combo recorder and transfered some of my old VHS tapes to DVD-RW (the Samsung only records on DVD-R/-RW). I used the highest quality setting which records a little over 1 hour of DVD footage on the disc. The DVD menu created by the Samsung is very basic, so I decided to re-author. I ripped the DVDs to the hard drive of my PC and realized that the rip always failed at 99% in all cases. Still, the resulting image is fully playable and the actual footage plays 100% to the end, so I didn't worry too much about that. I imported the disc to Nero Vision (latest version 4.7.0.16) and Nero automatically converted the footage to an mpg file on my hard drive. At this point I don't think Nero transcoded, because the conversion from VOBs to mpg was very fast. In Nero Vision options I selected High Quality, and Automatic for everything. I didn't add any effects, filters, or transitions, I just set the chapters, created the new menus, and proceeded to finish the DVD, but Nero transcoded the footage. I set SmartEncoding on (instead of Automatic), Nero again transcoded the main footage. Is there a way to avoid this? What I want is to encode the menus only, but leave the main footage as it is. Any suggestions on software that can do this will be appreciated. Also, does anyone know why ripping the DVDs created by the Samsung machine always fails at 99%? Thanks in advance for any replies.

Nero always transcodes, as do some other authoring tools. The best one that doesn't transcode is TMPGEnc-Author version 1.6.

As to the ripping problem, this is likely some quirk of the Samsung-burned discs, are you finalizing them?

Yes I finalized them. Thanks for the tip!

I agree fully with CDan.