Hi
I am thinking about buying a New G4 1Ghz Mac with a SuperDrive
and would like to know if I will be able to back up my DVD movies.
If so what software will I need and how do I go about it?

Many Thanks
Plucky:gabby:

Simply put, yes you can backup your dvd movies. better still the G4 will come with iDVD prebundled and this should allow you to do all the backing up you want

hope that helps

yoshi

Well Actually there's a lot more to it than Yoshi's telling. You can't backup DVD Movies but you can create them in iDVD. DVD Movies need to be ripped then remixed and burned via Toast Titanium or Nero Burning Rom. I'll repost the information on how to do it from the archives.

For DVD to DVDr rips

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Hey buddy. For a straight DVD movie rip follow these instructions.
You'll be more successful ripping a DVD in classic mode.

You'll need some tools that are available for free over the net.....

DVDextractor 0.9b, MAC3dec, MPEG append.

You'll need to buy or already have the following...

a tool from Apple...DVD Studio Pro.

And Toast Titanium 5.0.2.


1. 1. when you insert the DVD you can do a 'Get Info' on it to see it's size...
If the size is 4.5GB or under you can go to the file menu in DVD extractor
and choose 'Save Image...', then select the DVD from desktop (navigate to
it) then choose the destination to where you will save it to, and hit
okay... You will have a Toast image of the entire DVD to double click and
burn!

2. If the DVD that you inserted is more than 4.5GBs then the next thing to
do is check the 'tracks'. The largest track is the entire movie... sound
tracks, video, & credits. If the 'Track' is around 5.5GB, then just select
all of the check boxes to the right except 'other' and 'merge' boxes. then
grab the 'Track' and drag it to the destination. The reason I say 5.5 is
because the 'track' will contain all of the sound tracks... commentary,
other languages, etc. but only the movie clip and base AC3 audio is needed... So you will have to get rid
of the others and keep the audio for the movie... Sometimes you get surround
sound, and stereo audio with one track.. the surround sound will be at least
double the size of the regular stereo. It will also extract some .spc files
which are nothing and can get trashed. Once you have extracted the .m2v file
and at least the first audio file (which will usually contain 00 in its
name, as opposed to 01, 02 that the others will have)... You then open up
DVD Studio Pro and import those two files I mentioned earlier. Once you have
them imported, you drag the .m2v file to the window above it... then drag
the audio (.ac3) file to the "track" file that was create when you drug the
.m2v file up... then click the background of dvd sp (outside the little
"track" box) then look to the right, then in the "startup options" click the
pull down and select the .m2v file. Once you do this you can look up and see
the space bar at the top of dvd sp, this will tell you if the dvd will be
too big or just right to burn. if the bar stays in the gray, then you're
cool, if it turns red, then you're over the size. Now you can click the
"preview" button and you can preview the movie how it will come out...
Sometimes you will not be able to preview the video, meaning you will look
and the counter at the top and see it go from 00:00:00 to --:--:-- and then
back like it's in a loop... if this happens you will need the MPEG append app... just drag and drop the .m2v file over it, and when it's
finished you can take that file and import it back into DVD sp and be able
to view it... also if when you go to import the audio you can't see the file to import it with DVD studio Pro, but you know it's there then it'll need to be fixed with MAC3dec, open up the app goto file > fix > select the audio file and wait, when it's done re-import into DVD SP. (If the audio is ahead of the video and is not in sync then you will need to start over and extract the information by scenes and omit the beginning intro filler scenes ie; tri-star or universal openers , select the same options as before ,but also select "Merge" test in DVD SP or repeat omitting more filler scenes in the beginning until the audio is in sync with the video then re-import.) Once you see that the audio and video are in sync you can hit
the square stop button, go to the file menu and select "build disc" and
there you go... once this is finished you can then take the Video_tS folder
and burn it in toast to get your finished DVD... I'm assuming you would know
that procedure, cause if you don't do it right, you could have a $5 coaster
(I did it wrong once).

The whole process takes about 3.5 to 4 hours with no mistakes or need to repair or append files on my MP800 g-4 configured with 1.5gig of ram and 110gb of hard disk, and that's still a long time in my opinion. It can be up to 6 hours if repairs and appends are needed. Leave about 7 gigs free for all this data.




P.S. remember to use general purpose DVDR media.


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For DVD to VCD
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Now for VCD's You'll need

DVDExtractor 0.9b

MacMPEG2Decoder AVb7

MAC3dec

Quicktime Pro

QT mutator

Extract the Movie off the DVD as the previous instructions Then drop the m2v file into MacMPEG2dec. Save as Motion JPEG A set to best quality on the single field option. Set it to save at 23.976FPS NTSC or 25FPS PAL. This will take a while. Almost 8 hours on a fast G-4.

Open the AC3 audio file with mAC3dec and save as an AIFF. Once this is done you can use the instructions from the blibler as follows....

Combining the Audio and Video parts together
In Quicktime Pro add either the video to the audio, or the audio to the video... or both to a new movie... with both lining up at the start of the film (you do this by having the playback location at the start of the movie, when you select add)

Synching the start of the movie
Then save as to a reference movie. Open that reference movie in QT Mutator start playing at the start of the film. if it is in sync (wait for people to start talking, and see if it looks right... if it has been dubbed, don't rely on the voices matching the faces.) if it is in sync, go to the next part. If it isn't, then select one of the tracks, and set an appropriate offset. If the video is ahead of the audio, offset the video, if the video is behind the audio, offset the audio. Due to an issue with Quicktime, a track can't have a negative offset... it saves as a reference fine, but it won't save to a self contained file. One problem you may encounter is when the video and audio is only just off. Often it is difficult to see which way you need to move it... move it a bit each way, until it looks right.

Synching the end of the movie
OK, so now we have a movie which is synched at the start. Now, we go to the end of the movie. Again we see if it is synched. If it is, go onto the next part, if not, you need to vary the duration of the video track. We vary the video track and NEVER the audio track. This is because:

we know the audio is correct; and
the video frame rate can be changed without problems, while the audio does not change nicely.
So you change the duration of the video track, until the end is correctly synched. You increase the video track's duration if the video is ahead of the audio, and reduce it if it is behind.

Checking the synch of the middle of the movie
The next step is simply to check if it is synched all of the way through the movie. go to the middle, and a few other places in the movie. Play it, does it look like its synched? if so, then you have a synched movie. Go to the last step

If it doesn't look good, then you have a problem... you have one chance that it will be easy to fix: go to the start of the movie. check if it is still synched. if it isn't then you were a bit too offset happy to begin with. You may be able to adjust the offset and duration to get a correctly synched file... go through the process again, but this time be aware of the fact that the duration of the video will affect how big an offset you want (it shouldn't be significant, so you can safely ignore it the first time around.. but it may be) if you try again, get the start and end synched up, but it still doesn't sync in the middle, then you are in deep trouble.

There are two problems that I know of that can explain the sync at start and end, but not in the middle. They are:

The audio cuts out occasionally. This means that the audio goes along normally, and then it goes silent for a moment or two, before resuming smoothly. This is the only case in which the audio is not correct. What you need to do is to cut apart the audio, and splice it together, so there is no silence where there shouldn't be; or
The frame rate deviates incorrectly throughout the video. This is an known issue when using the On2 VP3 CODEC with MM2Db6 and later... and can occur elsewhere too. There is no solution to this, beyond splitting the video into sections, synching the video and audio separately, and hoping that each section doesn't end up too out of sync. It is the ugliest problem and solution, and when I have encountered this problem, I have never bothered with fixing it up... If I lose the DVD, I would rather just buy it again, then spend the many hours required to get it looking half-decent.
There are ways to aviod this problem. If you want to encode into On2 VP3 from MM2Db6 or later, you can export the MPEG2 to Motion JPEG. Once it has been exported, you can export the Motion JPEG movie into On2 VP3, using Quicktime Pro
Saving the movie
The final step is to save the movie. Save as a self contained, single fork, flattened offset file.

Once this is done drop it in toast to create a VCD.

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For Macrovision Defeat
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Sure you'll need the following software to essentially use your DV cam as a bridge.

Apple DVD Player
Final Cut Pro
Toast Titanium

And the following hardware.

DV camera with analog inputs and firewire connectivity
A g-3 or g-4 with firewire
An "InFocus" video mirror presentation box or an equivalent that provides analog output to your DV Camera

You'll need to mirror the video output of your monitor and grab the audio out from your mac's built in audio. Pop in the DVD Movie and play it with DVD player as a full screen presentation to the monitor being mirrored And redirect these signals into your DV Camera's analog input(this uses your Dv camera as the source monitor for the mirror). You'll notice that the Macrovision is bypassed on any encrypted movie by doing this.

Now just start recording the movie on your DV camera. It'll come in with Dolby Pro Logic encodings intact. Once done recording disconnect from the analog connections and reconnect via firewire. Lauch Final cut pro and import the footage from your DV camera into your computer. Then you can either play with it and add additional effect if you want or just save it as a movie ready to burn to Video Disc format in Toast(Since many 90 min movies won't fit on one cd-rw media, you will need to split the movie into two segments for a set top compliant VCD).

Drop the files into toast and let it convert the movie down for you into a VCD package and burn to CD-RW media. You're done in half the time or less than the traditional methods with full Dolby Pro Logic surround and video quality on a par with high end VCR's.


(a friend of mine uses a wired4DVD card installed on his g-4 to achieve these same results, unfortunately Radius is no longer and the cards are difficult to find so my method works and hasn't let me down, nor is it as expensive as a wired4DVD card)

:bouncing: :bouncing: :bouncing: :bouncing: :bouncing:

To you all

Thank you very much.
What a cool forum this is.

I saved a 7.8 GB file as a toast file w/dvdextractor and toast 5.1 can't mount it. Is this because it is too large? Does anyone know what I could do with it?

Originally posted by newt
I saved a 7.8 GB file as a toast file w/dvdextractor and toast 5.1 can't mount it. Is this because it is too large? Does anyone know what I could do with it?

Too big!!!! And what format are you using on your Hard Disk? Should be HFS+ to get beyond any two gig limitations. Are you trying to burn to a DVDr? Then cut the file down to les than 4.5 Gigs.

Re-read the above posts carefully and try again.

I read the above post. My drive is hfs + is a G4 powerbook. I'm not trying to burn it. I just want to mount it and play it on my computer. Toast wont mount it

Originally posted by newt
I read the above post. My drive is hfs + is a G4 powerbook. I'm not trying to burn it. I just want to mount it and play it on my computer. Toast wont mount it

Oh then mount it with DVD Extractor then drop on DVD player. Should work.

So I have to rip DVD movies to backup them up does this also apply to PS2 games do I have to rip them to there is no way to copy them directly.

Originally posted by Pugie
So I have to rip DVD movies to backup them up does this also apply to PS2 games do I have to rip them to there is no way to copy them directly.

No for DVD games a direct 1:1 copy can be made using Disc copy feature in toast 5.X or by using save image feature in DVD extractor.

Originally posted by sengimage


No for DVD games a direct 1:1 copy can be made using Disc copy feature in toast 5.X or by using save image feature in DVD extractor.


hello. I tried the method above to make a 1:1 copy of a ps2 DVD game using Toast Titanium but it didn't work. I got a 'buffer underrun' message. Is it because of the hd file format or something?

I also tried to save an image of the original DVD using Astarte CD-copy and then burning it with Toast, but something strange happened. The size of the resulting image (1.45 GB) was half the size of the original (2.9). I tried to burn that image anyway and the console reads it ok, but hangs after the first intro movie. (Obviously, there's not all the stuff in there)

So, where's my mistake? can you help me, please?

thanks

Originally posted by flm



hello. I tried the method above to make a 1:1 copy of a ps2 DVD game using Toast Titanium but it didn't work. I got a 'buffer underrun' message. Is it because of the hd file format or something?

I also tried to save an image of the original DVD using Astarte CD-copy and then burning it with Toast, but something strange happened. The size of the resulting image (1.45 GB) was half the size of the original (2.9). I tried to burn that image anyway and the console reads it ok, but hangs after the first intro movie. (Obviously, there's not all the stuff in there)

So, where's my mistake? can you help me, please?

thanks

IMHO I always found toast flaky in this department. Maybe it's just me But I could never get it to work right. DVDextractor is the best bet....for a CD, DVD or any other media. GOTo>>file>>save as image >> select source of image >> select save location >>>>drop that image in toast and burn away all day

Also a buffer underrun error is commom when going from DVD to DVDR drives. Try to image first then burn from the image....if you're not doing it already. Otherwise the error could be caused by a dirty optical or dirty media. The unit craps out attempting to read.

thank you, sengimage. I've just downloaded DVDextractor. I'm going to try this out this weekend. :)