Hi All! Just signed up for this cool site. I'm not sure what the best category is to put this thread in. Hopefully someone can point me in the right direction. I did some searching but couldn't come up with any solid instructions for what I'm trying to do. For reference, I've been running DVD Decrypter and DVD Shrink for a while now but only for DVD backups and nothing else but I do have them installed. I recently bought a Panasonic dvd-r camcorder which burns to the small discs. This will replace my old 8mm tape camcorder which has served me well. With the old one, I used to use Pinnacle to capture from the tapes and burn onto DVD. Now with this one, I can only get about 20 minutes on high quality mode per each side of double sided discs. And from the nature of the design, when each side of the disc is filled up, the camcorder will convert the captured video into standard .vob, .ifo, and .bup files. What I would like to do is somehow JOIN or MERGE as many sides as I can to fill a standard 2 hour 4.7gb dvd like I did before. I heard that these newer digital dvd camcorders are pretty crappy for what I want to do, but I found this out after I already made the purchase on ebay. From what I've read here, I may be able to use DVD Shrink or DVD Decrypter using IFO mode? Something about file splitting = none and demuxing but this is all confusing to me. I also downloaded vobedit but don't know how to use it. I don't need to EDIT the video files, just JOIN them to fill a 2 hour disc. Is this possible? Each side of the finalized disc from the camcorder will create a menu showing the dates of each video session and you pick whichever day you want to watch the video from. I don't know if its possible to just merge say 4 or 5 disc sides and menus together. I can't believe no one else has raised this question, unless I just didn't dig deep enough with the search engine. Thanx in advance for any help!!!! Dave
Hi, and welcome to AD! This really is a rather old question, but still, here goes: First, you need to understand that small dvds are exactly like regular dvds, only smaller. *_* So if size if not a problem, you can join (and edit) the videos with programs like DVD Shrink (or Nero Recode) very easily. First, copy all the Video_TS folders contained on each side of the small discs onto the harddisk, each under a separate folder (e.g. disc1, disc2). Second, run Shrink, click 'reauthor', go to each folder prepared in step one, click to paste the respective 'titles' under each folder onto the the left window, adjust 'compression setting' if necessary, then burn away! Unfortunately with Shrink, you won't be able to keep the menus. Happy DVD reauthoring!
Thanx for the info! Is there a way to I can combine the vobs with Shrink then use Nero or something to create a dvd menu to "jump" to different scenes? I wouldn't want to not be able to jump to a scene and have to fast forward for an hour to get to it.
If you do it with Shrink, the scenes would still be separated, and you can use the 'chapter' function or 'time' function on your dvd player to move forward quickly. Only the original menus on the small dvds would be gone. It was said that if you use Nero Recode, the original menus would still be kept. But I'm not sure whether it would apply to your case 'cos your're transferring videos from camcorders.
Hi. I got the vob files all on one 2 hour dvd-r based on what you guys suggested. I tried with both DVD Shrink as well as Nero Recode and got satisfactory results with both, just what I was looking to do. The only thing is that since the Panny camcorder doesn't show the date on the videos (when they were taken), there is no way of telling a time period. The only solution I can see is if I write a date range on each disc. I wish that now that I've merged all of the vob files from 4 different mini disc sides onto one disk, that some sort of a menu could be added to the beginning of the disc showing the date range at least. Thanx for everyone's help!
