The VideoLAN Forums

Hi guys,

I've just realised that VLC can "rip" - or should I say "stream to file" - DVDs which I never knew and find to be pretty amazing!

However, I'm having a particular issue when doing this on longer DVDs for example 100minute ish films.

Basically, the encode completes and I can then play the generated file back in VLC. However, playback seems to hit the 60 minute mark and then one of two things will happen:

[a] the video will continue as normal but the audio will stop
the audio will continue as normal but the video will stop

(I haven't yet had both the audio and video stopping)

I get the same issue with different DVDs on both Windows (newer hardware) and Linux (older hardware).

So I was wondering if this was a known "thing" and what I might do to prevent this. I have thought of two causes:

[a] Something maybe to do with the "disc-caching" option being too low? Like the CPU can't keep up with the encode? If I increase this setting will that have any effect? How will changing this setting alter the generated file or its playback?

Is it something to do with the DVDs in question being dual-layer which can "trigger a slight pause"? I think this because the issue seems to happen in the middle (chapter-wise not time-wise) of the DVD.

Any ideas and advice greatly appreciated, thank you.

- Daniel

PS. I should mention that I am transcoding the DVDs to "Video - H.264 + MP3 (MP4)"

I guess this isn't a DVD read issue because the same thing happens if I copy the DVD contents to hard disk and then stream by opening that folder (as a "disc").

(Unless copying to hard disk somehow also glitches the middle of the film?)

Can you share the logs?

You should use Handbrake, though...

Handbrake was recommended to me but seems to choke on any DVD I give it (I also couldn't compile it for my Linux).

Excluding pricey commercial software, VLC is the only thing so far that sorta kinda seems to work.

I'll try to post some logs from both convert time and playback time.

Thank you.

Wow, this has opened up a huge can of worms.

Numerous and various errors being thrown.

[1st thing] Sometimes when streaming from the DVD to a file on disk I'll get like:
"dvdread error: read failed for 1/4 blocks at 0x139"
But I don't know how serious that is and I don't know if that read error will eventually be corrected.
When I use VLC to play the film straight from DVD, I don't get these errors and the film
plays all the way to the end without issue.
Also, if I copy the DVD files to disk and stream from that, I don't get these errors, but
the resultatn MP4 file still video freezes about 1 hour through,

[2nd thing] At or before the problematic 1 hour stage, I'll get "main error: cannot add a new stream (unsupported while muxing to this format). You can try increasing sout-mux-caching value" which I don't know the meaning of.

I tried streaming and manually adding :sout-mux-caching=6000 to the options box, but it had no effect. Honestly I don't know what this option means or its default value (or
the units!).

The mystery deepens...