Chris, are you sure there's no 'copy protection', CSS or other stuff on the DVD ... i.e.what's its heritage/how was it created etc... ?
when you say 'can't get any other program to recognize these files'.. do you mean mplayerX, mpegstreamclip, VLC, QT, FFMPEGx, Gumby, mediapipe, simplemovie, DVDBackup & similar tools (for the DVD)...as well as QT pro & QT-based tools ? (there are a
lot of players, decoders & converters about....
I generally use one tool to go from DVD structures to disk then use different tools on the files according to my goals...
BUT: i think everyone who works with this stuff'd agree that
b we need a hardy, general-purpose 'fix mpegs to compliant' tool for MPEGs on Macs (for use pre-quicktime)
i.e. a decoder/player with a 'pass-through' exporter which allows 'clean data' through
b without
recompressing audio and video because in almost every case where I've had the time to really look at the data, 99% is OK but the data has 'glitches' in it: bunches of binary zeroes from sloppy programming, junk After valid header/data chunks but before the next header from improper 'split & Join routines, lost timecode/data ... and so on... (You'll see 50MB mpeg files that QT info says are 10 secs long at "10MBps"...when they are 30 mins long - at the much lower ⚠ correct data rate - which seems to suggest that the 'info' is obtained by a bum calculation in QT rather than by ref to info in the file & other headers. When played in VLC, mPlayerX etc. they
generally play OK -i.e. for the 30 mins).
The trick is to get the
output of one of these into a useable file on disk...
without transcoding which is why de-MUXing and remuxing can be a good way to go..many of the tools discard bad data and/or reconstitute correct formats etc. mpegstreamclip is very promising, but it isn't clear just when it's transcoding.. and 'save' and 'save as' seem to often fail due to an apparent programming bug. [e.g. if you input m2v/m2a it'll often fix data & TC Breaks (great work!).. but you have to use 'export to/convert to/demux to for output :=
even if the target is 'm2v/m2a' same as input, you 'convert to' m2v/m2a.. which is not outstandingly intuitive ...
grin
best wishes,
