So I picked up Gangs of New York and to my surprise the studio has decided to split the movie in 2 parts. Each disc contains a portion of the movie and a portion of the special features. I used DVD Decrypter to rip the movie to the hard drive (15 GB!) and I wanted to know what is the best way to burn the complete movie to DVD?

Are you sure about that? It seems highly unlikely to me

(Which version is it - PAL or NTSC)?

-P

I just finished watching it tonight! It's the NTSC version. You start watching the movie on disc 1 and then half way through the movie it will ask you to insert disc 2 but both discs contain special features. Is this the movie industry's way of getting back at us or what?

doesnt matter it will fail as usual! it may stop a few people who haven't got the nouse to figure it out (or trawl round for an answer) but it won't stop determined people (like you)

after all you already want to find a way round this,

wonder if this is an option that could be added to CloneDVD? select two movie streams from two different folders and stitch them together,

have you tried just burning them both to one DVD and seeing if they just play straight on from each other? unlikely but worth a try.

The PAL version has all 25 chapters of the 2:39:55 long movie on disc 1...

There are no extras on this disc, just the chapter menu.

Looks like they don't trust you NTSC guys!

-P

I've just made excellent, whole disc copies using two different transcoders.

I haven't tried anything yet, as far as burning goes. I wanted to check around and see if anybody had done this before. Reminds me of the laserdisc days.

This is the first title that I've come across that was distributed like this. This is going to piss off a lot of people who aren't going to put up with switching discs

Your still referring to the PAL version right?

He sure is, backed it up the other day myself.

You never saw my lips move, did you

Yes, Lazza is correct, it's the PAL version.

-P

This type of presentation is usually referred to as a 'flipper', and it's hardly new (but, in fact, I fear it will become more common as the industry fights to hold it's obscene profit-margin). A search under Flipper in Doom9 and in other forums will produce many guides and posts desribing the issues involved in a one-disk copy [btw, approximately 70 of the 10,000+ titles on dvd are flippers]. PearlHarbor and LotR-Extended come to mind as real stinkers (especially considering the 9-vob limit in IFOEdit.
The best guides I've seen for transcoding/combining are at:

http://www.sirscrub.com/start.htm

Check out the whole site/links--but the one most relevant is the one for LotR (these are _compiled_ guides, well linked to other common ones...).

Tip o' the Hat to SirScrub.

edit--btw, these 2-disk flippers (inclusive of the side A/B variant) are common enough that Sony mega-changers are built to handle their two-sided nature during playback...puts me in mind of old Wurlitzer's!

Thanks for the post Loggy!! I was not aware of DVD "Flippers" before as far as splitting the movie and features onto 2 discs.

Region 4, Australia and other countries I've never heard of, don't have flippers (or none that I know of. Pearl Harbor and LotR main movies are all on one DVD

kewl...
One or two more little reasons like that are all I need to start filling out immigration papers...
Know anyone at the Aussie/NZ Embassy?

Yeah that had me fazed for a bit. I simply ripped disc 1 in Ifo mode using DVDDecrypter to a folder deleted the ifo file, then ripped Disc 2 in Ifo mode deleting the ifo file into a separate folder. I renamed the vobs in the 2nd folder to 5,6,7 and 8 moved them into the 1st folder which had the vobs from Disc 1 that were already named 1,2,3 and 4 and used IfoEdit to create Ifos. Then I used dvdshrink to shrink it to fit. It worked like a charm. It actually turned out to be so easy to do I can't believe I scratched my head at first.

This is exactly what I had hoped would work! THANKS!!