Alrite, I think mostly everyone knows some basic strategies of getting a DVD-9 to fit on a DVD-R. Can someone help me figure out this more advanced problem?

Basically I have a DVD whose 'main movie' is spread across different sets of VOB files. Each set actually represents an 'episode' and there are 5 episodes on each DVD.

Episode 1
--------------------
VTS_03_01.VOB
VTS_03_02.VOB

Episode 2
--------------------
VTS_04_01.VOB
VTS_04_02.VOB

Episode 3
--------------------
VTS_11_01.VOB
VTS_11_02.VOB

Episode 4
--------------------
VTS_12_01.VOB
VTS_12_02.VOB

Episode 5
--------------------
VTS_13_01.VOB
VTS_13_02.VOB

The first file is 1,048,404 KB, and the second file is about half the size. My question is: is there any way for me to fit this DVD-9 onto a DVD-5 easily? I don't mind if I lose the menu; I just want to get all the episodes to fit.

try re encoding it to mpg2
and leave all but the english audio intact

Check the newbie guide.

So your saying the first epsode took 1 gig and the other epsiode was 500MB, or are you saying 1 VOB is 1 gig and the other is 500MB?

You might be better off making 2 dvd's pending on how muhc space the whole thing is.

episodes 1-5 are on the same DVD, and the first VOB of each episode is a 1 gig and the second file of each episode is about 500 MB...

If i were you ... I would rip all those VOB's on your hard drive as VOB files. Then rename them all in order (i.e VTS_03_01, VTS_03_02, VTS_03_03, etc.etc.)... Now im not sure if you can point smartripper to a specific volder to pick up vob files... but im pretty sure it cant.. So.. I would put the newly named VOB files onto a dvd-rw and re-rip them in smartripper.. Demux ... and whala... everything is all good.

nefarion, i was thinking about that, but i would like to preserve the subtitles as well as the different language tracks. any suggestions?

1.5x5=7.5 and you want to fit it all on a 4.38 gig DVDr with the different audio and subtitle tracks... Not possible. You that would mean about half the bitrate for the video stream and then you would need an authoring package that supports subtitles and multiple audio streams so that you could put it all back together.

You could try ripping the VOBs, renaming then as a series, opening it up in DVD2AVI, it will load them all up, save out a D2V file while demuxing the AC3. Open the D2V in TMPGEnc, rencode, author adding a chapter for each episode and a menu and then burn. You would be better rencoding each episode seperatly though and adding them as seperate titles.

This may still mean a way low bitrate for the video, depending on how much of the VOB is additional audio streams.. You may have to put only 3 or 4 episodes per DVDr or drop the res.

1.5 x 5 = 6.5 :D

heehee, anyway, there's only 2 audio tracks, 1 japanese, 1 english and 1 subtitle, english...

i don't mind a 6.5 to 4.3 downgrade, but it's just preserving the streams and chapter pointers that i'm confused about... :p

I think that some one needs to go back to school. 1.5x5 definatly equals 7.5. Preserving chapter points is easy, smart ripper adds them to the info file and then you can just easily re-add them. However not many authoring programs support adding subtitles.

1.5 x 5 = 7.5! :p my mistake

hahah silly me... darn... this is gonna be tough then :(

no its not. You just can't use 1 DVD. You will need 2. Thats why I asked the vob question earlier because I thought it would equal 7.5. You will just have to divide the episodes onto 2 different DVD's. The newest version of Ifoedit has this option.

By the way, you might want to just go out and buy the anime DVD instead :-).

FYI, i did buy it... i just don't want to buy ANOTHER copy for my brother... i hate how we've reached the age where we must both buy our own copy of everything... mind as well share when we can : p

i'll try the dvd-r split thing then... i just didn't want to have to split 5 episodes into 2 dvd-rs... so one dvd-r will have 3 and the other will have 2 or something... oh well

beggers can't be choosers right? : p

"... are 5 episodes on each DVD." You made it sound like there were multiple DVDs and not just one... So if for example there were 3 that would be 15 episodes, 3 per disc would mean 5 DVDs instead of 3.