Questions and Answers on DVD/Blu-ray Tech

Every time that I need to use a Flash USB drive, SD card or a HDD I must format it and create a partition before using it, such as NTFS, FAT, FAT32, etc. So this makes me raise some doubts:

1. Why don't I need to do the same with CDs and DVDs?

2. Operating systems usually do it before burning media without warning me?

3. What is the file system typically used on CDs and DVDs?

4. Could I create two or more partitions inside the same DVD?

Is it possible to somehow create a copy (an image) of a heavily cracked CD-ROM (but not broken in two)? Hopefully without damaging DVD drive...

_{Unfortunately CD 2/4 of Polish version of Planescape: Torment game got cracked...}

The problem: a big collection (about 100 DVDs) of old home videos which have been burned to DVDs. Some of them are already damaged and are barely playable (often depending on the used DVD player).

Now they should get backed up to an external hard drive for future use.

The way i see it there are basically two options:

• Creating .iso images (or similar image formats)
• Ripping the video contents (with software like DvdShrink or similar)

Iso images may be more difficult to play from the hard drive when backed up, although i think VLC media player for example can handle DVD iso images just fine.

When ripping the video, doesn't this introduce additional errors (because of the decoding/encoding)? In this case it is probably not significant enough because of the already quite poor video quality.

To make this clear: these are home videos, so there is no copy protection or anything in that area, however some of them don't play back very well on certain DVD players.

My question is: What would be the better way to go in this case? If the material/DVDs are already partly damaged does one of these methods work better? Which method is better for creating new copies in the future?

I know that similar questions already exist such as this, however because of the nature of the source material and the different possibilities, i think my question is a different one.

I've burnt the Windows 8 Developer Preview DVD and inserted it into my laptop. Setup starts and looks good, but it then prompts me for a DVD driver. Saying it is missing.

I can't progress further than this. There is no dedicated DVD driver to download for my laptop.

Is this normal?

I need to copy some QuickTime videos from a DVD, but the filenames contain quotation marks so Windows prevents me from copying or moving them to my PC.

Does anyone know what can I do?

I am running Windows 7 Professional.

I have a Lenovo Thinkpad W510. Currently I have a SSD 125GB hard drive in it, but that is too small for me.

Is it possible to replace my DVD drive with another SATA Hard Drive?

I have a very old Acer Laptop and it's not reading CDs anymore. Therefore, I am not able to boot from CD.

I bought an external DVD writer, but there is no option in the BIOS to boot from it.

Is there any way I can install an operating system on the laptop?

I have Acer Aspire 2004 model running Windows XP.

Can I connect the laptop hard drive to a desktop perhaps?

In Windows Explorer, when I click on the drive that happens to be my cd/dvd drive, I get the message "please insert a disk into drive", which might be OK, but then the DVD drive opens and I have to close it. I consider this very rude and I do not like it. Is there a way I can keep the DVD drive from opening when it is empty and Windows tries to access it?

I have both "Region 1" and "Region 2" DVDs that I'd like to view on my PC (Mac). If I have separate external drives for each Region can I watch DVDs of both regions by using the appropriate drive? Or does the OS recognize only one region?

I have a CD/DVD drive in my computer for a long time, and it worked properly. I got a dual-layer DVD disc recently, and it loaded. Since then, i started using a lot of those discs and suddenly it started taking a long time for those discs to load, but after some time even that failed and it wouldn't load these discs at all now. I still got that drive in my computer, but i bought a newer one recently because it started nerving me a lot that it can't load those discs. Even with that CD/DVD drive, it wouldn't load them, so i figured that it must be a problem in the computer. I wanted to ask if someone had a similar problem, and if he did, how did he solve it? I run Windows 7, the older drive is Optiarc DVD RW AD-7170S ATA, and the newer one is either a VUHS 1QNW56BOXY SCSI CdRom Device or a HL-DT-ST DVD-RAM GSA-H55N ATA device... As you can probably see, i'm not very familiar with this subject.

How can I mix two movies together before I handbrake them?

I've got a two part movie on my disk as a pair of VideoTS folders. I want to generate one output movie. I plan on using handbrake to do the encoding, unless someone can point out a better way to do it. The final intent is to create a video file for my iPhone or iPod. I've got about 90 videos already like this, but never done a two-parter.

Am I forced to handbrake it and then reauthor it using another platform? I can do that, but figured there was an easier way to do it. If there is another bit of software that changes my workflow but does this in less steps, I can accept that as an answer as well.

If there isn't a way to combine the two into one video file neatly, then my choice will be to open it in something like Windows Live Movie Maker and just mix the two input mp4/m4v into one file.

I have been looking into copying the contents of old CDs onto mobile disks in order to save space and preserve the content, since rewritable CDs appear to degrade over time (at least the ones I am using). I have come up with this little script which works nicely with ISO9660 formated CDs

#!/bin/bash
echo "Reading Volume Information"
SOURCECD=/dev/cdrw
OUTPUTCDDIR=/workarea/tmp
isoinfo dev=$SOURCECD || { printf "%b" "FAILED.\n" ; exit 1 ; }
VOLUMEID=`isoinfo -d dev=$SOURCECD | grep "Volume id" --color=never | awk -F": " '{ print $2}'` || { printf "%b" "FAILED.\n" ; exit 1 ; }
VOLUMESIZE=`isoinfo -d dev=$SOURCECD | grep "Volume size is" --color=never | awk -F": " '{ print $2}'` || { printf "%b" "FAILED.\n" ; exit 1 ; }
LABEL=$VOLUMEID-$VOLUMESIZE
OUTPUTDIR=$OUTPUTCDDIR/$LABEL
if [ -d "$OUTPUTDIR" ]; then # Dir exists, mention that...
echo "$OUTPUTDIR exists...exiting"
exit 1;
fi
mkdir -p "$OUTPUTDIR" || { printf "%b" "FAILED.\n" ; exit 1 ; }
OUTPUTISO=$OUTPUTDIR/image.iso
echo "Copying ISO for $LABEL"
dd if=$SOURCECD of="$OUTPUTISO" bs=2048 conv=sync || { printf "%b" "FAILED.\n" ; exit 1 ; }
echo "Verify Structures for $LABEL"
isovfy -i "$OUTPUTISO" > "$OUTPUTDIR"/verify-report.txt || { printf "%b" "FAILED.\n" ; exit 1 ; }
file "$OUTPUTISO" > "$OUTPUTDIR"/file-report.txt || { printf "%b" "FAILED.\n" ; exit 1 ; }
echo "Generating Metadata for $LABEL"
md5sum -b "$OUTPUTISO" > "$OUTPUTDIR"/md5.sum || { printf "%b" "FAILED.\n" ; exit 1 ; }
isoinfo -d -i "$OUTPUTISO" > "$OUTPUTDIR"/metadata.txt || { printf "%b" "FAILED.\n" ; exit 1 ; }
isoinfo -l -i "$OUTPUTISO" > "$OUTPUTDIR"/ls-lrt.txt || { printf "%b" "FAILED.\n" ; exit 1 ; }
eject $SOURCECD || { printf "%b" "FAILED.\n" ; exit 1 ; }

This works nicely with ISO9660 formatted CDs, however fails (not surprisingly) with UDF formatted CDs and DVDs. Does anyone have any ideas of tools like this which I can build to use a similar script for DVDs?

I tried dd, dd_rescue and ddrescue, all failed.

Since AnyDVD makes the disc copyable in a second on a Win7 host, it should not be too difficult. It says that the UDF filesystem is patched, curiously, it also says that there are no bad sectors. The whole DVD is copied in 10 minutes. What does AnyDVD do?

AnyDVD reports the same thing when run in a guest WinXP in VirtualBox but bad sectors are encountered while copying. No problem on native Win7 though. I guess AnyDVD does not have enough control over the DVD drive and the problem already occurs when the Linux host is trying to read the disc.

dd is fooled, it finishes but just produces a small file and states it's finished.

dd_rescuse and ddrescue are complaining about read errors and are intolerably slow. These tools can copy only a few MB in 10 minutes.

Why is this happening, why are these tools failing?

How can I copy my own DVDs to the hard disc so that I can play them back later?

I am looking for a permanent solution preferably on a Linux host but it can involve VirtualBox and WinXP, and freeware / shareware tools. Native windows is also acceptable as long as the solution only involves open source / freeware tools but not shareware software.

• Copying data from DVD with bad sectors (found this one after my question was migrated)

• Recovery from optical media ignoring read errors

• How do I copy data from a defective DVD to my hard disk?

I have some old DVDs that I created myself years ago using Adobe Premiere.

They are standard movie-format DVDs which play in any DVD player.

What is the SIMPLEST way to get the video out of the DVDs and into a single big AVI or MP4 file... without having to become an expert on DVD formats, VOB files, etc?

I have found 3 states of a DVD player:

• Able to jump to disc menu, able to skip chapter
• Unable to jump to disc menu, but still able to skip chapter
• Unable to both jump to disc menu and skip chapter

Why does my DVD-player/program enforce this? How can it be bypassed?

Something odd happened to my DVD drive about a year ago. It won't read any blank disks - only original ones. I tried cleaning the lens, but it didn't help. What should I do? It's an old drive, but it never had such problems. What's strange is that it DOES read original disks, but not blank/written disks, although it's a DVD-RW drive.

I didn't had this problem before, recently I bought a SSD and installed Windows 7 x64 on it, and now the DVD sometimes spins without reason, it has no CD in it (this makes a bit of a lag).

EDIT:

it usually spins when I start windows explorer, or some other action that probably involves exploring windows folders (starting winamp also could spin it)

saving a file (in ms word ctrl+s) can also spin it

I want to copy movie DVDs to an old 1TB external disk where they won't be susceptible to scratching. How do I do this?

• What software do I use to rip those DVDs?
• What about copy protection?
• What format should I pick? The kids love to watch the German versions of the movies, but sometimes I watch the English versions with the older ones. If we do, they like having the English subtitles for a reference.
• Anything else I need to think about?

I'm on Windows. I'd be willing to setup some Ubuntu VM if that improves the result considerably, but I'd clearly prefer a Windows solution.

I have Windows 7 PC. When copying a movie file (mp4) from a DVD to my PC's hard drive, in Windows Explorer, I'm getting the error:

Invalid MS-DOS function.

The error message pops up, I cancel out, and the file is not copied at all. I have many other mp4 files on the DVD (I custom ripped it), which copied just fine.

What does it mean? How can it be resolved?

Update

Ok, it seems the file may be corrupt at the end of the movie file, as it causes VLC to hang and crash.

I once bought a DVD containing four 90-minute-long movies. Now I'm trying to write such a DVD, but don't know how to do it.

I tried to use DVD-Flick, but it says the disc is 98% used for a single 90-minute movie. My movies are 700MB dvdrips (AVI).

How can I put four movies on one disc?