Need utility to fix errors on DVD...

[truth2power]

This is a DVD made by a political activist group. Not copyrighted. There are errors on the original disk which seem to be even worse on the copy.

I used DVD shrink to make a copy, which plays fine on my stand alone DVD player, but there are places where it just stops and you have to press "skip" on the remote to get it to continue (as on the original).

I thought I saw a program on freewarefiles.com which will repair errors, but I can't find it again.

Can I fix the errors on the original so I can make a better copy??

OR..can I fix the copy?

Thanks, in advance, for any help.

[SlackJawedYokel]

1. You need an error-free original or

the source files to reburn the DVD.

You can't fix the errors.

There may be workarounds, like some sort of auto-skip thing, but I'm not familiar with any.

Cletus

[truth2power]

2. So, what about utilities which supposed ly fix errors?

Not sure I understand tht. Maybe they're talking about something else.

[SlackJawedYokel]

3. Could be.

Honestly, if I ever had errors I simply reburned the DVD at a slower speed with error-correction enabled.
That typically does the trick.

Cletus

[truth2power]

6. Hmm...worth a try, I guess.

[RoyGBiv]

4. Could be a scam ...

I've seen software that promises to do amazing things but really only installs a virus or sucks money out of your wallet.

If it's a physical error on the disc surface, no software is going to fix that.

You *could* rip the DVD and re-render the raw video files in such a way that the errors are skipped or blurred or something, but that's a time-consuming process that probably can't be done well automatically with a single utility.

[truth2power]

5. I appreciate the info. I'm not going to spend any money

on this. I'm really in learning mode, here. This media stuff is really complicated, IMO, and not much information written for dummies out there. As far as "re-rendering" etc. that's WAY beyond my abilities. :)

[RoyGBiv]

7. It's easier than it seems ...

The basic concepts are pretty easy once you get past the language used. At first its all codecs and frame rates and muxing and demuxing, etc. When I first started playing around with video, I realized to do things well, I'd need to separate the audio from the video tracks, then put them back together again. The mere thought of that horrified me because, as I'm sure we all have, I'd seen video where the audio and video tracks didn't match up.

It's the detail work that can be complicated.

Are you using a Windows based PC? If so, there is some amazingly good software out there, and a lot of it, which is both a good thing and a problem. It's good because it means there's a lot of community support. It's bad because it's hard to figure out what you really need, what works best, etc. Windows video editing software also tends to be commercial or shareware. The free stuff doesn't do as much as it could do, which often means you need a commercial program to really get good. My first attempts were accomplished with three separate programs, only one of which wasn't intentionally crippled in some way to encourage payment. (The most annoying thing was finding a video format converter that would adjust a framerate of 25.x fps to dvd standard, which was what was often required when trying to turn a batch of avi files into a DVD.) But, I don't mean to turn you off. There are some good video editing guides out there that can help you. Try starting at videohelp.com. It can lead you in some beneficial directions.

Anyway ... I use a Linux box for video editing now. At the moment I'm converting a PAL formatted DVD a friend purchased without realizing it was PAL format into a NTSC format DVD he can play with a command line script someone wrote that utilizes other free software that came with my distro. It takes about 10-30 minutes of actual work on my part, and the software does the rest. I never would have thought I could do this when I started, and when I started I was a great big idiot about all of it.