Home

Mini-DVDs are still very popular for video cameras.  They will record 30 mins to 1 hour depending on resolution on a single 80mm DVD.  The DVD can either be a DVD-R or DVD-RW.

Problems often arise when the disk is removed before it is finalised.  The other major problem is when the DVD-RW get formatted by mistake  -often operator error.

The CnW tools for this are in three parts

• Data carving to find chapters
• Merge chapters into a single DVD compatible file structure
• Burn a new DVD

These stages can be done by hand - or rather better there is a mini-dvd wizard function to perform the first two stages, and then optionally also burn a new DVD.

Mini DVD systems normally use MPEG-2 to record their video.  The benefit of MPEG is that even fragments of video can be viewed with requiring  and special meta data files.  Thus even a badly corrupted or damage disk can often be recovered to a level that video can be viewed.  However to view files on a video player, the MPEGs have to processed and indexed.  They are then saved in a specific directory structure as below

       VIDEO_TS

               VIDEO_TS.BUP                // backup of video_ts.ifo

               VIDEO_TS.IFO                        // index info for the complete disk

               VTS_01_0.BUP                // backup of vts_01_0.ifo

               VTS_01_0.IFO                        // index info for all video cells and chapters

               VTS_01_1.VOB                // the video info - in effected merged .mpeg files

               VTS_01_2.VOB                // continuation, a VOB is normally less than 1GB in length

File names are always upper case.

The CnW tool will merge mpegs and create the files described above