^^^thank you for the information. I was able to do a bunch of old movies with absolutely no problem. I am still having a great deal of difficulty with the "99 track" encrypted movies. ESPECIALLY disney movies. Can you provide some tricks or tips to figure out how to get the correct track to convert? Putting the DVD in my dvd player and looking at the OSD is just not working at all with disney movies.
also can you tell me more about anydvd and if it is worth purchasing?
Thanks for your help.
You are welcome,
Maybe I should explain DVD tracks first.
DVD tracks (I name them this way, I don't know if there is an official name for it) are actually similar to music playlists. If you take a TV show DVD for example, often you will find a "play all"
track and an "episode selection" area where you find individual tracks for each episode. While it appears that each episode is on the DVD twice, they are in fact only on there once, but they are just located in 2 playlists. The first playlist, the play all track, just has all the episodes, and the other ones are just playlists with 1 episode.
The 99track issue is a protection system used on some DVDs, intended to throw off DVD conversion tools. Most conversion tools automatically pick the longest track found on the DVD, and in this case, it points to a playlists that contains nothing but reports a long playlength.
Other tricks that are used with the 99tracks are that the playlist contains a scrabled scene order. Play the end first, then the middle, and then the beginning for example.
In most cases, the 99-track issue can be resolved by using the track number displayed by the DVD layer or Windows Media Player.
Make sure you are actually in the movie when you look at the number. The DVD menu, as well as pre-movie messages and trailers all have different numbers so even if you select Play from the menu, it might not display the correct track number.
With recent movies I used this for myself include Iron Man 2 (track 40), Star Trek 2009 (track 21) and Disney's The Princess and the Frog (track 29)
The other method I mentioned in my previous response takes a bit longer.
If you click Cancel when the track selection appears on these DVDs, DVD Catalyst will scan each of the 99 tracks (which takes a second or 2 per track usually, so for 99 tracks it takes a few minutes) and eliminates fake tracks (tracks/playlists that point to non existing video) leaving you with maybe 10-12 tracks left from the 99. From there, basically selecting the ones that are close to the playlength listed on the back of the DVD case will result in the proper movie file. Before starting the conversion, you can preview the track in the build-in preview to verify if the one you have selected has the correct order, and then start a conversion.
AnyDVD (or the free DVD43 which is similar but not as often updated) acts as a layer between the DVD drive and Windows. It sits between the DVD and the program that accesses the DVD. When AnyDVD or DVD43 finds a DVD, it scans it, and based on its findings it will redirect the conversion tool automatically whenever it is accessing the DVD. As a result, the DVD appears region free and issue-free. Bad tracks are hidden from the conversion tool.
Personally I don't use AnyDVD or DVD43. While they can help with DVD conversion, I don't want my customers to have to rely on other software to do the dirty work, so I am always working to make sure it works without it, but I have to admit, AnyDVD is the perfect companion to DVD Catalyst. Besides making it a lot easier to work with tricky DVDs, it also speeds up the conversions a bit as well.
I had anydvdconverter and it was working until recently. And when I e-mailed them, they really didn't have any solution. I would put the dvd of the tv show in and only one episode would show. And it was the most recent version of anydvd.
DVD Catalist worked and showed all 3 episodes on the DVD.
Thanks Deb
Confusing as it is, Any DVD Converter is not the same as AnyDVD. Any DVD Converter appears to be using a marketing technique made famous by Eddy Murphy in "The Distinguished Gentleman", Name Recognition. There are quite a few apps out there that use a similar technique. I have used it in 2005, and it kinda backfired. In 2005, DVD Catalyst was called PocketDVD. My competitors were all named along the lines of Pocket DVD Something (studio, wizard, encoder etc) so I figured I'd use "PocketDVD" and ride along on their names.
Unfortunately, even though the look of PocketDVD was completely different than that of my competitors, I got flooded with support emails from their customers, so I made a drastic name change to DVD Catalyst, and added the eyes of my cat as a logo.
