I'm so confused.

I put SCRUBS, Season 1, Disc 1, in to my pc with the latest builds of AnyDVD and DVDClone. There seems to be too many chapters and titles. The disc has eight episodes on it (plus some bonus material), but CloneDVD shows the following content:

Title -- PlayTime -- Chapters

01 -- 2:57:53 -- 9
02 -- 0:01 - 1
03 -- 23:23 -- 2
04 -- 22:12 -- 2
05 -- 22:11 -- 2
06 -- 22:12 -- 2
07 -- 22:11 -- 2
08 -- 22:12 -- 2
09 -- 21:42 -- 2
10 -- 21:53 -- 2
11 -- 23:23 -- 2
12 -- 22:12 -- 2
13 -- 21:53 -- 2
14 -- 0:12 -- 2
15 -- 0:09 -- 3
16 -- 28:34 -- 17
17 -- 2:25 -- 2
18 -- 2:04 -- 2
19 -- 3:10 -- 2
20 -- 2:06 -- 2
21 -- 1:39 -- 2
22 -- 1:23 -- 2
23 -- 1:15 -- 2
24 -- 3:32 -- 2
25 -- 1:18 -- 2
26 -- 1:52 -- 2
27 -- 2:15 -- 2
28 -- 0:51 -- 2
29 -- 2:33 -- 2

That is nearly EIGHT HOURS of material (7:58:36). That can't be right. And lots of the chapters appear to be identical when you watch them. Although there are three episodes with director's commentary, they are just additional audio tracks, not entirley separate files. What is wrong here? In case it helps, the info on the disc produced by AnyDVD is below:

===========================
Summary for drive E: (AnyDVD 6.0.1.1)
Drive (Hardware) Region: 1

Media is a Data DVD.
Booktype: dvd-rom (version 1), Layers: 2 (opposite)
Size of first Layer: 2011184 sectors (3928 MBytes)
Total size: 3909724 sectors (7636 MBytes)

Video DVD (or CD) label: SCRUBS_DISC1
Media is CSS protected!
Video Standard: NTSC
Media is locked to region(s): 1!

RCE protection not found.
DVD structure appears to be correct.
Found & removed invalid VOBUs!
Autorun not found on Video DVD.
Bad sector protection not found.
Emulating RPC-2 drive with region 1!

it is not duplicate info. the first title that shows as 3 hours is the equivalent to clicking "play all episodes" on the dvd menu.

the others are the equivalent of the episode selection option.

the first title (play all) recycles the data from the individual episodes

there is only really about 3 hours worth of episodes (plus all of the bonus footage). the episodes are already pretty highly compressed. I copied mine to a SL disc and got VERY noticeable lines and blurring even after using dvd shrink's deep analysis options.

there is a lot of data on this disc but not quite 8 hours worth you CAN copy this to a SL disc, but I'd recommend splitting across 2 discs or using DL. my results in compressing to a SL disc were not very good. I have a piece of junk tv so if i can notice it, it's pretty bad haha

Good catch reasonsnotrules.

But even when you split it across two disks (keeping all Title Sets), it will still read out as too much data for two blank disks.

When one encounters the "Play-All" or "choose each episode separately for viewing" type DVD authoring, one has to choose whether to keep the big (2:57) "play all" title or all the individual 22 min titles. How do you want to watch it? I always dump the big play all title. Gives me nice breaks to go make a coffee etc. Choose one way or the other but you can't keep both. And be sure to "Preserve Menus" either way that you backup the original.

FYI: It's similar to the angles issue ie all that data is not really on the DVD original. But the backup software doesn't know that and reads out 8GB of data.

Whisperer

Correction: I think you have to dump the big "Play All" Title because, on many episodic DVD's, it actually doesn't contain the episode data, but only directs the player to run each of the 22 min episodes in sequence. Sorry my blunder.

Dump = rip (to hard drive)

or

dump = ignore?

Please forgive me if I'm being a n00b.

Forgive my stupidity, but I suppose (1) preserve menuss is desired if you're going to burn a traditional DVD playable in any player and (2) irrelevant if you're ripping to the hard drive with the intention of cutting into AVIs.

Correct?

ahh we were unaware you weren't burning to dvd.

if you're ripping to hard drive I'd still "preserve menus" (not sure if it matters or not, but it doesn't hurt as the manus don't take up much space).

by "dump" he meant "get rid of" if you're ripping to cut into avis then you want all of the 23 minutes clips as these are the actual episodes. the ~3 hour titleset just holds "shortcuts" and not any actual data so you can leave that off (although the filesize won't change whether you include it in your rip or leave it off.

so to recap, doens't matter so much what you do with that 3 hour titleset as it does not contain actual data. you do need to make sure you include all of the ~20 minute titlesets as these are the actual episodes.

I wasn't sure yet exactly what I was going to do. My dvd player plays Divx files, so to save space, I thought I'd backup to Divx *if* I could figure out an easy way to do it. Otherwise, I'd just burn traditional dvds (but burn two DVD5s per DVD9 original per suggestion of reasontorules).

My experience with every dvd I've ever backed up before now was that a complete copy to DVD5 took about 30 min to crunch the data and 5 to burn the disc. When I tried to use DVDClone2 to rip files (at 100%) to the hard drive or to make a dvd of so many titles as 100% will permit, it reports it will take nearly six hours. I guess it takes what it takes, but that's very different from what I've encountered before.

THANK YOU FOR ALL YOUR HELP.

in that case there's something wrong.

it should not take clonedvd2 to rip that long at 100% (in dvd+/-R DL mode)

if you're just ripping it in DL mode anyway, you might as well try using the anydvd ripper and see how fast it goes about the job.

if the anydvd ripper also reports such a huge slowdown then you should check to ensure that DMA is enabled for your drive.

Been at work all day.

Ya, it matters reasons ... one has no way of choosing the episodes without leaving the menus preserved. First one has to go to the dvd menu and choose the first episode to play. After the 22 minute episode's credits end, the playback will cycle back to the menu again and one chooses the next episode to watch. Remember, there is no "Play All" so it's "manual" play choices. You must "Preserve Menus" or you can't play the episodes.Actually, when the "Play All" title is un-checked, the compression meter will shoot WAY up to show WAY less data being compressed. The "8-hours" (false data size readout ie the original's authoring tricks CloneDVD into thinking there are two full sets of episodes) will now become a managable 4-hours which can be split over two disks or burned to a DL blank without compression or can be compressed more reasonably onto one DVD5 (I never compress).

It's just like eliminating the un-needed angles in the three most recent Star Wars DVD's ... dump the angles titles and the compression meter jumps upwards showing way less compression ... there was very little data in the SWs angles but CloneDVD "saw" two or three full movies worth of data.

I know that my friend reasons won't mind if I correct her on things that I have experienced. If I'm wrong on anything here, then please counter me back.

Sorry to say that i don't know anything about avi or why people even need it. I just burn DVDs to protect my collection.

Whisperer

whispere, i said the preserve titles may or may not be necessary because he's splitting them to avi not watching the disc on his computer. you just separate out the PGCs in a program like dvd decrypter...you don't go through the menu at all.

and this is not an issue with "angles" like in star wars. I'll admit I'm not familiar with tieles with multiple angles and the best ways to edit them, but i can tell you that the entire "play all" titleset is just a redundancy. if you deselect it NOTHING happens. on the other hand, if you keep it selected but delect all of the individual episode titlesets you'll get 0 data on the disc. it's like on your computer when you have a program and a shortcut to that program. the shortcut doesn't contain the data but directs to the file that does. there's no data in the "play all episodes" titleset but it points to the titlesets that do contain the data. it's sort of like a playlist for that data and it MIGHT be a couple MB in size, but not big enough to sunstantially affect compression rates or anything like that.

i don't know if you've have different experiences on different episodic dvds? it's been as i described on all episodic dvds that i've come across although i recognise that other may be differe.t i do own the scrubs series and am testing season 1 disc 1 in my computer as we speak and my statements above are based on that.

Ok, thanks. I got different results on my Alfred Hitchcock Presents and (I think also) the Star Trek: The Next Generation episodics collections. You are correct that there is little data in the "Play All" titles but by deselecting that big title, it breaks the "link" between the Play All title and the individual episodes ... that link is what tricks CloneDVD into thinking there is double the data on the original.

Best regards,
Whisperer

weird. i've never had trouble with clonedvd2 reporting double the DATA...

sure, it reports double the length (in minutes, etc), but i've never seen this reflected in the compression bar.

now you're going ot make me pull out al of my tv dvds and play around and try to figure this out haha. good thing i have nothing to do today