Reading an unfinalized DVD

I'd previously ripped an old VHS tape on to DVD, only to not be able to finalize it (since I did not have a remote.) During the recording process, I simply played three VHS tapes (with plenty of gaps in between each tape). My intention was to later clean it up and split into multiple video files.

I had an old macbook with a DVD player

First step was to make sure the OS was up to date. (The old version running on there did not have the recent root certificates in the stock Safari, and it did not support any "supported" newer browsers.) Then it was time to install Homebrew. After doing that, I installed a few packages. I could have probavly got by with just coreutils and ffmpeg. I installed the following:

brew install coreutils
brew install mediainfo
brew install ffmpeg
brew install dvd+rw-tools

I also attempted to install libav to run the script from this blog. Alas, I had no luck getting that to install. Luckily, it worked fine to just use VLC to read the file. (More on that later.) I did use the code to copy the DVD to the local computer. I had to use "gdd" instead of "dd". Before copying, I had to figure out where it was. The mount command showed the list of drives. I also used mediainfo to validate it was the DVD (though that was fairly obvious from mount). The OS tried to launch a tool to read it, but I just dismissed it. (I had already tried that unsucessfully). I discovered it was /dev/disk2 and was able to read it to a file:

mount
gdd if=/dev/disk2 of=image.iso bs=2048 conv=noerror,notrunc iflag=nonblock

The process did spit out some errors, but it didn't take as long as I thought it would. Then I had to figure out what to do with the file. I tried a perl script to extract data and a few other things. Then I found the easy solution. Just load up VLC and have it play the file. The time was a little weird, but it played.

If I could play it with VLC, I should also be able to convert it. The "Convert/Stream" option was what I was looking for:

The first settings was the one I wanted (H.264/MP3 with the mp4 container.)

It did want to save it with the m4v extension. ffmpeg did not seem to like that. So I ended up renaming it. 

There may also be an easy way to split up tracks in VLC, but I was not finding it. I watched the video in VLC, and then noted the start and end times for each section. Then I used ffmpeg to extract the sections.

mv converted.m4v converted.mov

ffmpeg -i converted.mov -vcodec copy -acodec copy -ss 01:27:16 -to 01:31:36 fragment.mov

The -ss and -to times take the run time position in hours:minutes:seconds. I start with the converted.mov and then output the fragment.mov. I can watch these on the computer as well as upload to Google Photos. (I can even upload them via a Pixel to not count against storage quota.)

I also installed Handbrake for transcoding, but did not end up using it.

In the end, after a lot of fretting over not being able to finalize the DVD, it turned out to largely be a nonissue. I didn't need any special software on a windows computer. Using just freely available open source software, I was easily able to extract the VHS tapes I dumped to a DVD and make them in to digital files. If I wanted to, I could even make a finalized DVD on the computer.