Ripping a DVD that was recorded in VR format

It may be that Handbrake can't read VR discs. You might try a different application like Toast, which I believe can read VR discs, provided that they are not copy protected. If the source broadcast contains CPRM or similar copy protection for DVR recordings, you won't be able to rip them.

This is a good question - I have one of those Philips machines too.

It's several years old and became progressively more unreliable.

There was also a feature that you had to 'finalise' a disc to make it more generally readable and I bet i never did that with many of my discs.

I have literally dozens of old DVDs lying around from this machine that I've never imported. I can remember archiving some discs to hard drive on an old Windows machine but can't remember what I used to do it.

I'm trying to remember if Toast can do it now on the Mac.

Alley_Cat wrote:
I can remember archiving some discs to hard drive on an old Windows machine but can't remember what I used to do it.

It may have been ISOBuster.

Cindyjk wrote:
Thanks, capaho for your suggestion. But I thought that Toast was just a burning app. Does it also rip? I want to rip these DVDs so I can watch them on Apple TV. Copy protection is not a problem, since these are home-made disks I recorded myself.

providing the DVDs are not encrypted, then yes Toast can convert from a DVD (or DVD image).

have you tried Handbrake to see if that is able to read the discs?

If you can rip them on the PC just run the resulting file through handbrake on the Mac.

Cindyjk wrote:
... as I said, it takes 3 times as long, and the filesize is about 2 times as large, as I normally get using Handbrake on my Mac. I had 30 minutes of video ending up being 1.3 GIGABYTES on the PC, so I want to get my Mac to do this, if possible.

From memory there were several quality settings on the Philips a bit like SP/Lp on VHS.

I suspect your Philips would have recorded to single layer DVDs that would hold up to 4.37GB or so.

If you had the highest quality you'd have got about an hour of recording on a disc.

So 30 mins being 1.3GB is not bad assuming it's raw MPEG2 from the disc.

What I would do if I were you would be to try to rip the MPEG-2 program stream off your home recording - yes it may be a large file up to 4GB+, but you have the original to work with then on the Mac via HB or whatever.

Use an external drive formatted to NTFS to allow >4GB file sizes (or splut VOBs at a convenient size eg 1GB if using FAT32) on Windows - the Mac will read but not write NTFS - fine for conversion or copying to a Mac drive.

Try and capture the original data then you can play with compression and discard original if and when you're happy with the compressed file for AppleTv.

There's also the possibility that the DVD you recorded on is incompatible with your Macs DVD drive of course. Check Apple>about this MAc>More Info to see what your drive supports for raeding/writing.

I've made dozens of DVDs on a Phillips set-top DVD recorder, using DVD+R media. Now, I want to rip them (using Handbrake) so I can watch them on my Apple TV through iTunes. Problem is, Mac won't read the disk. Simply says "You've inserted a blank disk". Ignore or OK are my only choices. I believe the Phillips recorder used VR format. Yes, I finalized the discs when I made them.

I just pulled out one of my old discs burned on the Philips 985 and made a quick test run on my older PPC Mac G5. If the discs are not being recognized as containing content and they are in fact finalized as you state, then you may have a combination of problems -- a weak burn/LP mode coupled with a possibly dirty lens. If cleaning the Mac optical drive lens does not help to read the discs directly on the Mac and your PC is able to read the discs anyway, my suggestion would be to simply copy the VIDEO_TS folder to an external hard drive attached to your PC. Then connect the external drive to your Mac, open HandBrake, and process your content normally. Since, as you pointed out, the Philips unit does not encrypt the data, the folder should copy without problem assuming the data is not itself corrupt.

Cindyjk wrote:
If I rip 30 mins of video on my Windows PC (using Wondershare), or on my Mac (using iSkySoft), it takes 3 times as long, and the file will be 1.3 GIG. Handbrake seems the only program that gives me reasonably-sized files, but Handbrake says the Video-TS folder that I can see in the Mac Finder view is "no valid format found".

Yes, but using these programs you are presumably converting to an AppleTV h264 format not getting the original data which would be better, as then you could run through Handbrake on Mac.

Also consider trying MPEGStreamclip on Windows (squared5.com) to see if it might read them (on MAc you'd need an MPEG2 plugin from Apple).

Does Handbrake on Windows work on Windows with the discs?

I made a copy of my DVD VR disk (using DVD Fab) on my PC.

Is this a PC ripping/copy application? When I said copy the VIDEO_TS folder to your hard drive, I literally meant to drag and drop the folder to the hard drive window and let the the Windows OS make the copy. The unencrypted Philips DVD movie should then be playable by any any media player capable of opening VIDEO_TS content (e.g., HandBrake, the Apple DVD Player, VLC, etc.) or media players capable of playing VOB content (MPEG Streamclip + QT MPEG-2 Playback Component, VLC, etc.). If the file does not play at this point, it is most likely corrupted. Before making my comments above, I tested this work flow by converting an old Philips 985 burned DVD+R wedding anniversary DVD to TV. It converted correctly in HandBrake v0.9.4 on my old PPC G5 since my MPB platform was busy converting other DVD content previously copied to hard drive for the purpose of batch processing in HandBrake.