repairing DVDs - any better suggestions

[Paul R Johnson]

With storage for projects at a premium, a while back I had a purge and archived many old projects onto DVD, not as the avi files, but simply as the project as supplied to the client on DVD. I chose old projects that were not going to require further editing - so any repeat requests would just be for additional DVDs.

One I tried to repeat today has a glitch and it seems to be a 'blob' in the plastic. One of the .vob files is corrupt. The duplicator rejected it, and inspection on the computer shows an error. What I'm doing is recompiling it by playing the DVD, which has a still, followed by a stutter, then it carries on. I'm importing this damaged section back into the editor as an avi, then I'm joining it back up to the other vob files by renaming them back to mpgs. A bit of cutting and a crossfade and I have the project repaired - but this is taking a long time.

Does anybody have a better and simpler way of doing this kind of thing? I am sure there must be one. Maybe a bit of software that can repair a damage vob?

I've been using external drives for the past year, and when they are full, buying a new one - but I've a fair few old projects that only exist as DVDs and perhaps I needed to check them all on the duplicator before archiving them - but I didn't!

[Ervin Farkas]

Try MPEG Streamclip - it has a timecode repair feature; timecode might be the only defect your DVD has. Export the whole video as mpeg, then reauthor the DVD with this file - no re-encoding at all.