How to rip widescreen when DVD defaults to full screen

[jklmnoqrip]

I am trying to rip Go from 1999. My DVD is single sided but does have an aspect ratio menu that opens first and asks if you want to watch widescreen or full screen. Haven't run across this before with MakeMKV, which rips the one movie file available as a 4:3 mkv file. I imagine I have to use VLC, open the DVD, choose widescreen, and then via some method rip the movie after hitting Play, which I have never done before.

So, is it possible to rip the widescreen using MakeMKV or any other suggested tool?

[tomty89]

First time I heard of such thing. Assuming the film is originally widescreen as usual, does the "fullscreen version/mode" look "squeezed" or cropped? (Assuming it's not the other way round -- that the "widescreen version/mode" is just a cropped fullscreen "fattened"...)

[jklmnoqrip]

Knew I forgot to mention something. Full Screen is cropped via pan'n'scan.

[tomty89]

If it is really pan and scan (i.e. the "scan" is not always the center part of the widescreen version), then it's probably "implemented" with multi-angle.

I have no actual experience with multi-angle DVD but I do know that they exist. It's just that I never thought that it would be used to provide alternate version of a different aspect ratio -- assuming that's the case here.

No idea how well MakeMKV support multi-angle DVD. Have you checked if by any chance the two angles/versions are already in the remux? (I think they would exist as two video tracks/streams just like audio tracks of different dubs.) If not perhaps you want to see if other tools like ffmpeg or mkvtoolnix would include the widescreen one when remux. (You can / would need to make a decrypted backup of the DVD with MakeMKV first; or some libdvdcss frontend like dvdbackup.)

P.S. IIRC by default ffmpeg would only include one stream per type (video, audio, subtitle...), so you'd probably need some -map argument to include (or select) the widescreen version. Either way, you can definitely use ffprobe to confirm whether the VOBs carry more than one video stream.

[jklmnoqrip]

It is true pan'n'scan with the crop going from side to side as deemed necessary by whoever does those things to get 4:3.

I will install ffmpeg and see if I can get ffprobe to work. First and only time I tried ffmpeg was nearly twenty years ago, and I couldn't get it to do what I wanted. At least not without spending a lot of time learning to do something once that wasn't all that important.

[dcoke22]

https://www.blu-ray.com/dvd/Go-DVD/1939/

The entry for the disc on blu-ray.com suggests it is a dual layer disc. I would guess that there is probably two titles on the disc, one that is the widescreen and the other that is the 4:3 pan & scan.

Does MakeMKV's log suggest that MakeMKV is removing any titles when it loads the disc?

[jklmnoqrip]

Rejoice! Thank you all for the help and getting my brain back on track.

Looking at the logs helped. VideoProc Converter is now merging the chapters of MakeMKV's missing title and outputting an mp4 file. Still not as an MKV file, which VPC will convert to directly from other file formats but not from a DVD. So, I'll just use its mp4 output file, export the subtitles and audio tracks from MakeMKV's full screen file, and use MKVToolNix to put it all together in an MKV container.

Notes
Once I saw in the log that "Title #2 was added" on through to Title #21 being added, I concluded that, yes, Title #1 must be on the DVD somewhere even if MakeMKV is not seeing it or fails to provide it as an option like it does with the other 20 titles. So, I tried the following:

• Opening the disc in VLC immediately starts playing the movie in widescreen with the correct audio. However, using its Convert / Save feature mucks up not only the metadata/file properties but also its saved MP4 starts off in widescreen but with commentary audio. Oddly, at the 39:04, which is when I thought the file would end, as there were three* 1+ gb VOBsub files on the DVD, the movie continues playing but in full screen, showing the timestamps as playing at 1:41:56 (of 39:04), which is 7s longer than the movie on DVD, skips a good chunk of the movie, playing the end of the movie.
  *Well, there were two sets of three 1Gb files, further confirming the presence of widescreen files. START THERE NEXT TIME! Either there or look at MakeMKV Source title IDs a bit closer.

• Handbrake was a crapshoot. Maybe I could figure it out but didn't bother as the few converted video files were either scrambled or all black.

• VideoProc Converter, which I keep forgetting I have, showed all 21 titles as options for conversion. A few quick tests and voila, success!