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camcorder-dvd-extractor

Extracts and transcodes clips from Canon DC50 camcorder DVDs.

I've never had the time or inclination to edit my camcorder clips into movies to watch. Instead I prefer to mix the clips in with photos taken at the same occasion and view them like I would photos.

I already put the timestamps of photos into their filenames to make it a bit easier to organise them, and wanted to do the same with my camcorder clips, and also to convert them from MPEG-2 to h264 to save disk space.

My camcorder, a Canon DC50, writes to mini DVDs in one of two formats - DVD-Video or DVD-VR. The latter is only available on rewritable disks, which is a shame because it's much easier to extract timestamped clips from that format.

For the DVD-VR format, I found this tool: https://github.com/pixelb/dvd-vr that extracts a "vob" file (MPEG-2) for each clip found on the disk, naming the file with the date and time, which is perfect.

For the DVD-Video format, it's nowhere near as straightforward. The only place I could find the timestamps was in the DVD menus that the camcorder generates, in bitmap text form. Long story short, I've worked out a process to extract the menu bitmaps (after patching a tool, because it missed the first page of menus), use OCR to convert the date and time to text, then use another tool to enumerate the clips (chapters), and finally extract, transcode and rename the files.

Usage

It can probably read the files direct from the DVD, but I always make a copy to the hard drive first.

You will need to finalise DVD-Video disks first.

I find that the Camcorder itself can read the disks with fewer errors that the DVD drive in my computer.

The container requires three volumes to be mounted:

  • /dvd - where the VIDEO_TS.IFO or VR_MOVIE.VRO, etc. files are located
  • /mp4 - where the resulting MP4 files will be written to
  • /log - where log files will be written
    docker run --rm \
      -v /mnt/sdc1/miniDVD/A:/dvd \
      -v /mnt/sdb1/miniDVD/A/mp4:/mp4 \
      -v /mnt/sdb1/miniDVD/A/log:/log \
      camcorder-dvd-extractor

You should see something like this:

docker@serf:~$ docker run --rm -v /mnt/sdc1/miniDVD.bak/A:/dvd -v /mnt/sdb1/miniDVD/A/mp4:/mp4 -v /mnt/sdb1/miniDVD/A/log:/log camcorder-dvd-extractor
Found a DVD-VR format disk:
Transcoding 20121225_034142
Transcoding 20121225_035148

or this:

docker@serf:~$ docker run --rm -v /mnt/sdc1/miniDVD.bak/1:/dvd -v /mnt/sdb1/miniDVD/1/mp4:/mp4 -v /mnt/sdb1/miniDVD/1/log:/log camcorder-dvd-extractor
Found a DVD-Video format disk:
Transcoding 20110412_1012
Transcoding 20110412_1104
Transcoding 20110412_1107
Transcoding 20110412_1108
Transcoding 20110412_1110
Transcoding 20110412_1111
Transcoding 20110412_1113
Transcoding 20110412_1113-2
Transcoding 20110412_1115
Transcoding 20110412_1205
Transcoding 20110412_1321
Transcoding 20110412_1327
Transcoding 20110412_1329
Transcoding 20110412_1330
Transcoding 20110412_1334
Transcoding 20110412_1400
Transcoding 20110412_1442
Transcoding 20110412_1500
Transcoding 20110412_1502
Transcoding 20110412_1503
Transcoding 20110412_1503-2
Transcoding 20110412_1603
Transcoding 20110412_1606
Transcoding 20110412_1606-2
Transcoding 20110412_1607
Transcoding 20110412_1608
Transcoding 20110412_1611
Transcoding 20110412_1612
Transcoding 20110412_1613
Transcoding 20110412_1614
Transcoding 20110412_1615
Transcoding 20110412_1617

The filenames follow the pattern YYYYMMDD_HHMM (DVD-Video) or YYYYMMDD_HHMMSS (DVD-VR) so that they appear in chronological order if sorted alphanumerically. If two clips have the same timestamp (unlikely in the DVD-VR case because it includes seconds) then an index is appended (see three examples above).

Third-party components

You can see all this in the Dockerfile, but to summarise: