The VideoLAN Forums

Several questions for the forum:

1) What are the audio and video formats of commercial DVDs?

2) How are the DVD menus generated? Does anyone have suggestions for packages which would be useful for developing them?

3) Could VLC be used to split a long movie into two shorter movies, for example to split it over two lower capacity dvds? If so, how, if not, does anyone know of any apps which run on macs or linux which can do this?

thanks in advance,
uncle dan

1: MPEG2 video, and for audio LPCM, A52 or DTS
2: no personal experience (bt any semi-professional DVD producer application can do it)
3: VLC is not the application to use for stuff like that.

Re.

> 3) Could VLC be used to split a long movie into two shorter movies, for example to split it over two lower capacity dvds? If so, how, if not, does anyone know of any apps which run on macs or linux which can do this?

There's a great program for that. It's called DVD2oneX. You can get the Mac version from http://www.dvd2one.com for 50 euros and it's well worth it. For what you're trying to do, I'd guess that it would be great in combination with DVDBackup (freeware). The point of using those kinds of programs is that you don't need to rip the content, just copy it with decryption. If you just want the feature and a single audio track, then much of the time it'll fit on a single DVD even if it was distributed on a dual-layer disc.

Cheers.

Re.

> 3) Could VLC be used to split a long movie into two shorter movies, for example to split it over two lower capacity dvds? If so, how, if not, does anyone know of any apps which run on macs or linux which can do this?

There's a great program for that. It's called DVD2oneX. You can get the Mac version from http://www.dvd2one.com for 50 euros and it's well worth it. For what you're trying to do, I'd guess that it would be great in combination with DVDBackup (freeware). The point of using those kinds of programs is that you don't need to rip the content, just copy it with decryption. If you just want the feature and a single audio track, then much of the time it'll fit on a single DVD even if it was distributed on a dual-layer disc.

Cheers.

Have you tried PopCorn from what used to be roxio? It is actually a compression program that will take a DVD and compress it to fit onto a standard recordable DVD. I use it all the time now to make backups. Bueno app.