Tonight I was attempting to rip a DVD to an AVI-XviD file thinking it would be easy – unfortunately not. It’s not a copy-protected DVD or anything, just a plain old DVD-R.
First I tried VirtualDub MPEG or whatever it’s called. It seemed to be either taking ages or not responding so I gave up and ended it. Next I downloaded DVDx and tried to use it to rip the files from the DVD. Still painstakingly slow (to the point I wasn’t sure it was still doing anything) and eventually gave up with a message about a CRC error. So, I decided to copy the VOB files (actually the whole TS_VIDEO directory) to hard drive and work from there.
It was then I realised the problem wasn’t with the aforementioned programs but with Vista itself. There were two 1 GB VOB files and the first of these refused to be copied. Vista was throwing up an error which advised me it “Cannot read from the source file or disk”. Bugger. Thinking it might be a problem with either Vista or the DVD drive I tried it in my trusty laptop (still running Windows XP Pro). It worked!
So how do I know Vista’s the problem? Well I tried to copy the file over my network back to the Vista PC and got a similar looking error dialogue, this time saying “Network Error: There is a problem accessing \\laptop\directory. Make sure you are connected to the network and try again.”
By this stage I gave up and just downloaded DVDx to my laptop, which I was able to use to copy the video to an Xvid AVI file. Nice work Micro$oft. Now all I have to do is successfully convert it to NTSC format and I’m flying – unfortunately that’s as much fun as pulling teeth, and much more painful.
may I take a wild guess? I have the feeling that this is intentional, read on my supposition:
1. on reading the dvd it’s slow because vista is constantly analyzing if the a/v streams are not rerouted to a copy program.
2. on copying/reading the files it fails with an error because vista detected those are (crypted?) dvd files (filename/extension/content based check?), and tell you “this is not intended to be copied/extracted/whatever, so just buzz off”.
I heard dozens of stories like this, incl. ‘protection’ process taking up as much as 70% cpu while playing a non-protected mp3, and ‘remote’ (via net updates) software execution disabling (again, checking based on filename+maybe a md5 hash) if it’s judged as piracy enabling y some microsoft’s party member…
the fix? back to xp, or better yet, macosx or linux, where the user can know what the freakin’ os is really doing.
I got the same problem, its a documented vista problem that will hopefully be fixed in the upcoming SP1 (Aug 14th RTM)
here are the links to relevant kb’s:
http://support.microsoft.com/kb/932045
http://support.microsoft.com/default.aspx/kb/931770
You can also get a hotfix from Microsoft for this till SP1 (end of March 08) which has worked on our machines.
SP1 came and the problem’s still there. Less painfull but after writing 2 times the same avi files on the DVD and not being able to read them… this sucks !
yes.. im running on SP1 and the problem still occur.. very slow reading dvd and sometimes it can’t open.
when i eject the disc and insert it back.. now totally cannot open.. it say “F:/ Application not found”.. i have to restart windows again and after that only i can read the dvd back.. but still slow..
huh.. tired on vista!!
Still having the same problem where Vista cannot consistently read a DVD that it just burned. In this case 2 GB of data files sometimes show up and sometimes don’t. Even when they do show up, there is a lot of disk accesses for such a simple task that take a long time. Quite annoying.