I have a video in a .MOD file format burned to a DVD. The video appears to play fine from Windows Media Player and others. When attempting to copy the video file off of the DVD, windows explorer freezes with a red progress bar. I tried tera copy (i'm looking for a free utility of course) and that froze. I've tried making an ISO of the disk, Poweriso encounters the error and offers to skip the cyclic redundancy check but still freezes. I would give up if it weren't for the fact that I can see the movie play just fine! So how do I recover this corrupted file, or file from a corrupted media?
Windows – Can’t copy video from DVD
dvdvideowindows 7
Related Solutions
Personally, for almost all of my Mpeg editing, I use one of two programs (which are actually the same program... just one is a much newer and more robust version of the other). Mpeg VCR, and the newer Mpeg Video Wizard. Neither are free, however. You say the original MPG file is corrupted, and thus the DVD is as well. With one of these two programs, you would most likely be able to open the corrupted file, and re-encode it to a playable state.
But... before you go off spending money, you should familiarize yourself with Videohelp.com and more specifically TMpgEnc. TMpgEnc isn't an editor per se, but it is a very powerful encoder, which means that it just may be able to load, repair and re-encode the MPG file you are working with.
It is also possible to manually demux the video (separate the audio from the video) and remux them back together to repair the time difference (if that is the issue, you don't directly say). However, on a broader note, Videohelp.com has links to all kinds of tools to assist you in doing this, and editing MPG files, etc.
You are right- DVDs should be nothing else than a bunch of data that can be copied. In fact they are. Just that the movie- industry tries and tried hard to protect them from being copied.
What you see is most probably some copy protection 1.
If your's was broken by someone and if it is legal (in your country) to make a copy by breaking the protection - either as personal backup or for others won't be easy to answer.
But when VLC can play your DVD my first guess would be 2 is circumventing the copy protection.
Every DVD- Ripping tool with the same capabilities as VLC (using the same library would be a hint) would be worth a try.
Just an idea how copy protection systems possibly work:
In early days computer disks had comparably few data capacity. As the data was stored on a single magnetic film disk (hence their name) it wasn't to hard to find out where exactly a portion of information was stored. So they used lasers and other tools to destroy tiny portions of that film.
Appropriate Software was aware of that error - it could even require that error to occur as part of the protection.
But others simply (tried to) read that sector and the read error caused them to cancel the action of reading/copying the data.
This way - depending on how the software was designed - it might have happened that this standard- software showed the correct memory usage of a disk, but couldn't even show a list of the files and directories on it.
Hope this explanation is more helpful than smart ass alack;)
Best Answer
Download HandBrake. Following the guide, you should be able to rip the movie from the DVD to a file on your hard drive. You can save the video file in either MP4 or MKV format.
NOTE: Please follow local laws and regulations when using this utility.