Phil Ehrens wrote: > William Astle wrote: >> It turned out that the video started out with a 720x480 frame size but >> later switched to 704x480. Then, some time later, it switched back to >> 720x480. >> > > That is GREAT! A new pathological dvd condition! > > I've seen plenty of dvd's where the framerate changed > randomly, and even where the audio format changed, but > I've never seen this one... Congratulations! > > As for how to deal with it, I think that avidemux would > be the right thing... In other words, cut it into chunks, > and then transcode it. I say this based on many years of > experience with automatic handling of framerate changes > (the simplest thing in the world, 99% of the time)... > Since it always fails at the worst possible time, it's > better to handle it manually and be happy with the result. > > I am suggesting avidemux for the cutting only, not for the > encoding. It's the right tool for cutting, subtitle OCR, > and resynching sound. >
I managed to find a mencoder incantation that did what I needed - it seems to handle randomly changing frame sizes by reconfiguring it's scaling algorithms when the size changes. Interestingly enough, VLC choked on the original VOB file, too, so I think it might be even more broken than it originally appeared (VLC suddenly went to an ultra-wide aspect ratio at the change point). For those curious, the file I was having trouble with was episode 4 of the 2005 season of Doctor Who as ripped from the NTSC (region 1) DVD release. Thank you for the avidemux suggestion. I'll play around with that.
