trying to create a compilation DVD and getting nowhere fast

ok, I have a tub of 8.5gb DL DVD's and want to use some to make a few compilation discs of 2 or more DVD's.

I've already done a 3 film compilation of three feature films with no problems at all. Menu is fine and all films play fine and quality-wise are as good as the source.

what i'm trying to do now is create a compilation disc of 3 stand up comedy dvd's i have.

what i've been doing is ripping each disc to my hard drive using DVD Fab under wine, then running each one through avidemux.

I use the DVD(mpeg2enc) container and lower the default bitrate from 9000 to 7000. I use the AC3(lavc) audio container and leave the audio bitrate at whatever it's set at.

I set the format to MPEG-PS (A+V) and save the MPEG file. That in itself works fine. I then use DeVeDe to reduce the bitrate of the file even further so it gets to around 2.7gb for each file, which will allow me to fit 3 onto an 8.5gb disc.

The problem I then get is that on each stand-up DVD, whenever the comedian moves his arms or legs there is a "wobble" when played back on my PAL television.

As an experiment, i used K9Copy to create an MPEG4 file from each disk, then added them to qdvdauthor and used the transcode option to increase the frame rate from 25 to 29.97 and this corrected the "wobble".

it produced two other problems though - when I was watching one of the routines, the timer on my DVD was frozen at the first chapter mark - the video was playing fine, with no wobble and sound in sync, but the timer wasn't advancing.

on one of the other videos, the sound was in sync, but speeded up so the comedian sounded like a smurf )

if i use avidemux and run a 2-pass conversion to get a 2.7gb output file, that also does work but then the sound is out of sync, and try as I might, I can never seem to correct it even by running it through avidemux loads of times and trying different numbers on the "shift" option.

so i don't know .. i'm stuck. I'm a linux newbie of a few months anyway, and i'm even more of a newbie at this level of video conversion - everything i've done so far has literally been trial and error and learning from my mistakes.

in a nutshell, what i need to do is rip the dvd, convert it to a 2.7gb MPEG file that has sound correctly synced and the correct framerate to play on a PAL television.

That's not that hard is it ?

any help would be very, very gratefully received as i've been trying to do this for about a week now with no luck, and i've posted this question on 5 different forums and nobody has yet answered.

thanks !!

 

This is off topic but could you post how you got DVD Fab working under Wine. That is one of the few programs I have been unable to get running with Wine.

 

err well i didn't do anything special with DVD Fab - I just ran the installer with wine and it installed and ran fine, and i'm using Linux Mint.

it's a bit fussy in that I can't minimise it otherwise it crashes, but as long as i don't do that it runs fine.

i know that probably doesn't help but that's all i did !