I have several movies on DVDRam disc, produced on my Panasonic DVD Recorder. This produces a single Vr_movie.vro file, regardless of how many movies are in there. I want to separate them out, edit and burn them to individual DVD-R discs.
Is there a solution to this?
Does any of the ripping software out there support the .vro file format?
I have a multi-format DVD drive on my pc which supports DVDRam.
Thanks folks
I'm doing what you want. I have 3 pieces of equipment which work with DVD-RAM:
- a Panasonic DMR-EH50 DVD recorder with a 100GB hard drive
- a WinXP Media Center 2005 Edition PC (64bit Athalon, 400 GB)
- a Panasonic DMR-ES30V recorder (no hard drive, but it can copy between DVD and VHS tape)
I can play the VRO files on my PC using PowerDVD, which came with my machine. Expensive sofware is available to take apart the VRO files produced by Panasonic DVD recorders. Here's a link
http://www.heuris.com/MPEGProducts/Xtractor/Xtractfeatures.htm Instead of buying this software I have a better way.
Both my Panasonic DVD recorders have built-in DVD editors and a primitive authoring package. On the machine without a hard drive, the editor can only be used on RAM disks. But on the machine with the hard drive, the editor can be used on both RAM disks and on the hard drive. The RAM disk VRO file is a disk image which contains copies of the hard drive files that were copied to RAM.
Here is how I do what you want. Using the DVD recorder with the hard drive, I copy the titles I want from the RAM disk to my hard drive. I prefer to edit the titles on the hard drive. Then I remove the RAM disk and insert a blank DVD-R disk. Then I dub the titles to DVD-R. That works great. I'm building a big collection of movies and TV programs.
The DVD-RAM files are interchangable btn my DVD recorder with the hard drive, my VHS/DVD recorder, and my PC. If you only have a DVD recorder w/o a hard drive, or a VHS/DVD recorder, you won't be able to get the DVD onto DVD-R. You need something with a hard drive. If you get a Panasonic machine w a hard drive, you can dub the DVD-RAM to the HDD and back to DVD-R.
If you go this route, here's something to watch out for. My Panasonic DVD recorder has 2 ways of recording on the hard drive. In the SETUP menu, you can make it generate files that can be copied at high speed to DVD-R. By default, this feature is not enabled. By enabling the high-speed copy feature I can produce a DVD-R with 4 hours of LP video in about 8 minutes. If I use the default setting where the high speed copy feature is not enabled, the same DVD-R takes 4 hours to produce.
When my DVD recorder is set up to generate files that can be copied at high-speed, it produces files that have been stripped of 2 kinds of information that cannot be stored on DVD-R. The DVD-R can only handle one audio track, so either the MAIN or SAP audio has to be stripped from MTS audio programs. The DVD-R can only store images for one TV aspect ratio. Hence, either the 5:4 or the 16:9 aspect ratio information has to be stripped. If this info is not stripped when the files are recorded, the only way to make a DVD-R is to play the video at normal speed with the appropriate audio and aspect ratio and record the result. High speed copying isn't possible
Today I put a VHS tape in the ES30V VHS/DVD recorder, and copied it to DVD-RAM. Then, I put the RAM disk in my other recorder and copied some titles to my hard drive. Next I tried to copy the titles to DVD-R at high speed. I discovered the RAM files generated by the VHS/DVD recorder cannot be copied at high speed. This is very disappointing. So in the future, I'll generate all my DVD-RAM files on the machine that makes files that can be copied at high speed.
When I tried working with DVD-RAM on my PC, I was disappointed at the very slow speed my PC writes DVD-RAM. A RAM disk that my Panasonic machine wrote in 12 minutes took an hour on my PC.
Here's what I did. I copied 4 hours of LP titles from my Panasonic hard drive to DVD-RAM. This filled the disk in 12 minutes. Then I copied the folder on the DVD-RAM disk to my PC hard drive. Then I put an unused DVD-RAM in my PC drive, and copied the folder back. That took an hour. The RAM disk my PC created worked fine in my Panasonic machines. This means I can use my PC hard drive to store images of DVD-RAM disks without any corruption.
PowerDVD was able to play the VRO files from the original and second DVD-RAM disks, as well as the VRO files on my PC's hard drive.
If you want to do professional looking authoring (better that can be done on my Panasonic machine), then you'll need PC software and the expensive program to take apart the VRO files. But if you just want a DVD with a few movies and a plain and simple top menu without any fancy graphics, the Panasonic machines do a fine job.
I think a Panasonic HDD DVD recorder is the best solution.
Because my VHS/DVD recorder doesn't produce files that can be copied at high speed, in the future, when I want to copy VHS tapes to DVD, I'll play them on a VCR, and feed the input into my Panasonic machine with the hard drive where they will be recorded ready for high speed copying.
This means the VHS/DVD recorder is not really a very good investment as a machine for dubbing VHS to DVD. However, I really bought it for a different purpose.
I record a huge number of programs, and I archive them to DVD-R. However, I don't want to finalize the DVD-R disks until they are full. If I record a series with one half-hour episode per week, one DVD-R disk can hold about 12 episodes. I have to delete the original recordings from my hard drive because it fills up. Hence I need to watch my programs on DVD-R disks that aren't finalized. It turns out that I can view these programs on both my Panasonic machines. I bought the cheaper VHS/DVD recorder so I could watch my unfinalized DVD-R's elsewhere in my house from where I record them.
it's easy and free. you need VOBEDIT and IFOEdit. open vobedit and Demux (on harddisk )files on your dvdram . You'll have an mv2 and an AC3 file. Then with IFOEdit you can create from this 2 files a dvd video structure. use Nero and burn...
Thanks guys for the info. As I only have a DVD Recorder without hard disk (and no editing capability) I am reluctant to buy another bit of kit to sit under my TV, so I can't see this being my answer.
I like the sound of the free solution, so I will track down the software you suggest and give it a go. I'll let you know how it goes.
Thanks again.
PS Any more ideas out there?
Update!
VobEdit does not recognize the Ram file format, so can't Demux it.
I guess this is Panasonics own format; maybe they offer software to 'open up' the Ram files?
