Jeeves and Wooster, the discs of doom

[loucipher]

I was going to post here asking for help, but I figured out a solution, so I thought I'd share it in case anyone else has a similar issue on this or another DVD.

Got the Jeeves and Wooster box set. Popped it into my Pioneer BDR-S13U-X, a Billycar special. Nothing, the disc isn't recognized either by makemkv or even the OS, shows nothing inserted and the drive never spins up. Tried again in an identical drive on another computer, nothing again. Tried on a Buffalo drive, and now te disc is seen, makemkv sees a dual layer dvd in the drive, hooray! But makemkv hangs forever scanning the disc and making no progress before crashing. Hurumph!

So, I fire up a terminal and try dvdbackup. It starts fine, but after reading about 4.7GB (the sharp eyed will note this is the capacity of a single layer disc), it starts throwing read errors and fails. Again, hurumph!

So, after some searching, I realized this was a poorly authored disc, and it was reporting as dual layer when really it was single! The solution is as follows:

Run the following command to get the real size of the disc (substitute the appropriate device for sr1):

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sudo isosize -x /dev/sr1
sector count: 2285861, sector size: 2048

Now extract the real data from the valid sectors with dd:

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dd if=/dev/sr1 of=~/jeevesS2D1.iso bs=2048 count=2285861 status=progress

Obviously use the size and count from the output of isosize, and name the iso file whatever you like.

Once complete, you'll have output like:

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4680685568 bytes (4.7 GB, 4.4 GiB) copied, 2371 s, 2.0 MB/s
2285861+0 records in
2285861+0 records out
4681443328 bytes (4.7 GB, 4.4 GiB) copied, 2371.32 s, 2.0 MB/s

Now you can open the iso file in makemkv and it should read as a normal and functional disc. Rip away.

Hopefully someone finds this handy should they encounter a similar situation.

[phantom_archivist]

What a weird coincidence - I was just backing up those discs at around the same time! Obviously you have great taste

On my set (region 2), series 1, 3, and 4 worked fine, but I had to use ddrescue to create ISOs for series 2. It is a lot slower than MakeMKV, though.

[loucipher]

Hah, that is funny! I also did A Bit of Fry and Laurie just now.

Mine are region 1, guess region 2 was slightly better! Still a pain though. Never had occasion to use ddrescue before, curious to see if it works for my discs, too. And curious if my method would work with your discs. What size were the isos yours produced?