RFE: Support DVD cameras and cut/capture of chapters

[Aaron Whitehouse]

I used a Sony DVD Handycam to record video on my 7-month OE.

The big difficulty is that, now that I am home, I have a stack of DVDs and it
is very hard to import them into a video editing program to edit them. I have
spent a lot of time ripping them perfectly to .iso images on my HTPC, so it
would be great if any import "wizard" could handle .iso files as well as DVD
discs.

I understand that each clip (from when you hit record until you hit stop) is a
separate chapter and each time that you take the disc out and put it back in is
a separate title (I also think that, if you have too many chapters, it will
start a new title even if you don't take the disc out). This makes working
with the .VOB files a very unsatisfactory way to edit the movies. Ideally such
an import would keep the video in its native MPEG format, so that there was no
quality loss through transcoding.

The best example of such a wizard that I can find is that of Roxio Easy Media
Creator, described here:
http://www.jakeludington.com/roxio/20071029_editing_dvd_camcorder_movies_with_easy_media_creator.html

http://60.234.40.20/~whiteho1/DVD_ROOT.tar.gz (29MB)

Is an example DVD that I recorded today (not the most thrilling video,
sorry) that has about 8 clips/chapters. I ejected the disc after recording
most of them, so it should give an example of multiple titles as well. This is files from the disc, rather than an .iso so that it is as small as possible.

I am more than happy to help with any work in this direction.

[Aaron Whitehouse (aaron-whitehouse)]

I've attached a torrent to a full iso file on my home machine.

Make sure that your torrent client supports web seeds, or it will not be able to use my broadband version. It would be great if somebody with decent bandwidth could seed a copy for me, as it will be painful for anyone trying to download it.

If everyone who wants it could all pull it down this Saturday (29 May), everyone could get it from each other as well.

I'm wondering if the best approach to this is for projects to work together on this. Given that OpenShot and PiTiVi are both Python programs and an importer would be a sort of mini-app to get the files from the disc/iso to the library.

[Aaron Whitehouse (aaron-whitehouse)]

The PiTiVi bug is https://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=584984

[moimael (moimael)]

Good suggestion, we will take a look at it ;)

[Daniël van Eeden (dveeden)]

This would also be nice for old video material. There are a number of companies which offer to convert your old Video 8 cassetes to DVD. The output format is DVD Video.

When importing many DVD rip programs will use 16:9 instead of 4:3 as used by those older camcorders.

[Daniël van Eeden (dveeden)]

Directly adding the VOB files didn't work. as the total lenght of the VOB files was not correct (both OpenShot and Totem reported the lenght as 15 seconds, but the real lenght was a few minutes.)

[Aaron Whitehouse (aaron-whitehouse)]

I have uploaded this test DVD iso file to Mega:
sony-dcr-dvd605.iso (1.32 GB)
https://mega.co.nz/#!fIcz2JQT!Y__32gBAibtwfUeDzAYbZ1uDRU9fm7B4TaR9_NdxbCk

As a workaround, I have uploaded my script to extract titles or chapters from an .iso file. For the example DVD, this means that I can run:
./vob-from-iso.sh sony-dcr-dvd605.iso chapters

and it will extract all of the clips. It requires mplayer. It certainly isn't polished, but it works for me.