editing home dvds

[legendnev]

how can i extract home videos from burnt dvds for further editing in imovie or idvd

[Catso]

It depends how you've created the DVD. If it's a DVD to play on a DVD player, the videos are now MPEG2s.

Put the DVD in your computer, browse the DVD. You should see a VIDEO_TS directory, with loads of files in. The biggest of these (probably named VTS_??_1.VOB) will be your MPG video files. Copy them onto your computer, rename to *.MPG and they should play.

Some editing programs can edit MPG files directly, if yours can't you'll have to find a program to convert them to AVIs or whatever.

The sound files will be in AUDIO_TS. It's difficult to be precise about these as there's several formats the sound could be in. The same basic principles as above, copy them off and rename them. If you're lucky, they'll be MPG files as well and you'll be able to play/edit them. They might not be though, and you may need to find a program that can convert them.

You should have kept a copy of the original AVIs, as there's a loss of quality when converting to MPG and probably further losses when your editor manipulates them. I suppose it's a bit late for that now though.

[Catso]

If you're still monitoring this...

I actually tried this last night. It turns out that in the case I looked at, the sound was in an MPG format, multiplexed (mixed) in with the video. So there were no seperate sound files. (I now think you'd only see these if you used PCM encoded sound) So anyway, I pulled off the .VOB file and saved it to my hard disk. I then used a utility called TMPGEnc to demultiplex (pull apart) the video and sound and ended up with a .m2v video file and a .mp2 audio file. Both of these would play OK in MS Media Player so I guess they were valid files.

I didn't edit the files, but I see no reason why I wouldn't have been able to.