making custom DVDs?

[eledoremassis02]

I hope this doesn't go against community guidelines (if it does please feel free to lock this thread)

I heard the First strike Dead Zone has much better PQ than the Pioneer one. However, I want to add the Pioneer dub to that DVD. Is it possible with keeping menus and things attached? (I'd be swapping the FUNi audio for the Pioneer one)

[Matches Malone]

Is it possible with keeping menus and things attached? (I'd be swapping the FUNi audio for the Pioneer one)

That's super easy, barely an inconvenience.

[Zestanor]

Make sure the dubs are timed the same, then the process is trivial, once you learn it. A program like this can extract all the streams from your discs, and a program like this can put them back together the way you want. Then you’ll need a disc drive that can burn discs, and a disc of course. Assuming they used dual-layer, the standard recommendation is Verbatim DVD+R dual layer discs. The + is important. And you don’t want rewriteable because this is a one and done project.

You’ll probably need to delete the new dub, to make space for the old one.

[eledoremassis02]

Thank you!!!

[Freeza Soldier #156]

That's super easy, barely an inconvenience.

I see what you did there.

[DrBriefsCat]

I once did something similar with the steelbook DVD. The Pioneer dubs seem to have been cut a little differently around reel changes and sometimes between shots. It would be easy to re-adjust with an audio editing program

[Robo4900]

I once did something similar with the steelbook DVD. The Pioneer dubs seem to have been cut a little differently around reel changes and sometimes between shots. It would be easy to re-adjust with an audio editing program.

That would only apply to the releases other than the one eledoremassis02 mentions in the OP, as the First Strike/Ultimate Uncut DVD is the exact same source master as the Pioneer DVD. I believe the only adjustment OP may have to make (if any adjustment at all is needed) would be an audio delay.

[GreatSaiyaJeff]

Is it possible with keeping menus and things attached? (I'd be swapping the FUNi audio for the Pioneer one)

That's super easy, barely an inconvenience.

Barely an inconvenience is tight!

[thejeremymenace]

Around 6-7 years ago I was creating custom DVDs, adding the Funi brick subs to the Dragon Box, keeping menus and everything. I eventually stopped doing it because
- it was incredibly time consuming and despite my attempts to automate, it just wasn't possible with some of the tools
- Burning DVDs takes a while, and if you mess up, the disc is junk and you have to start over
- I stopped caring about having a "shelf" version of DB
- I eventually caved in to the benefits of a digital collection of MKVs over DVD constraints

Even so, let me share you the steps I went through to make it happen. It's been a while so I may not remember every detail, but I can share the process and programs used so you can research further.

Step 1: Rip
Rip both your US and Japanese DVDs to bit-for-bit VIDEO_TS directories using your program of choice. I think the most preferred one for backups these days is MakeMKV. You've probably already done this step.

Step 2: Demux
We need to separate the DVD video sets into elementary video, audio, and sub streams. For this, use PGCDemux

Additionally if you want to retime subs, use VSRip to rip your subtitles to VobSub so you can actually modify them.

Step 3: Sync
Might not be an issue for you in this case, but I'm not super familiar with how those discs line up.

I wrote a program to do this (Dragon Radar) for me based on manually defined inputs. My workflow for finding the sync points was framestepping the two streams side-by-side in Virtualdub and recording the frame offsets (you can see how this data looks for Dragon Radar here). Unfortunately I can't recommend it for this case since it's basically designed to expressly create dual-audio Dragon Box MKVs and won't work if you're trying to sync to a Funi DVD. I had plans to make it more generalized one day but I've fallen off the project for some time. Feel free to browse the source repository for ideas, it's linked in my signature.

Subtitles are retimed by modifying the timestamp in the VobSub .idx files by simple string manipulation.

I use DelayCut to retime AC3 audio losslessly. The usage is pretty straightforward, so if you only need to make simple changes to a few files, it should be pretty easy to figure out.

Step 4: Mux
Mux your target streams (good video, desired audio, desired subs, chapters file) together with Muxman. This generates a VIDEO_TS directory as output that you could readily burn to disc as long as you didn't care about menus.

Step 5: Insert
This is the time consuming part -- at least it was for the Dragon Box's weird authoring structure. In your case, it should be pretty simple.

You need to replace the PGC of your disc with the one you just made. For this, you can use PgcEdit. For the disc you're doing, I think it should be as simple as a drop-in replacement. I believe the option to do this is File -> Replace VTST title, and find the IFO of the dir you created with Muxman.

Step 5.5: Hell
Since you're operating on a Funi DVD you won't be doing this step, but I'm including it for posterity.

The Dragon Box basically uses the max bitrate possible for the disc and there's pretty much no room for data leftover (in fact it took a lot of trial and error to get the dub audio to fit within the allowed bitrate). The OP video is reused throughout the disc for each episode, so there's only one OP video on the disc (in most cases).

But when you rip the episode programs individually, you get it attached to each episode. So when you replace the titles on the target disc, you go over the DVD9 size limit.

So in PgcEdit you have to go through each program chain and reassign the OP to the "reusable" OP title. You have to do that for the "play all" PGC as well as each individual one, and reassign a lot of cell numbers and make sure it matches the original disc exactly. This is the step that made me stop doing DVDs.

Once it's all settled, you can use VobBlanker to delete the unused OPs, and your disc is ready to burn.

Step 6: Burn
Well, I think you can figure this part out.

Hope that helps!