Combo of CCE encode with IFOEdit strip

The movie Im backing up now is Dragonheart, which is over 7 gigs big. When I look at it, the movie is only about 1 hour 42 mins long in vts_02 set but all the extras make up about 2.57 GB, in vts_01 set. All I want to keep is the main menu, main movie and 1 audio stream. How would I handle this? Would I: 1) Encode with CCE first, then use IFOEdit to strip out the extras? 2) Just use small, dummy vobs in place of vts_01 set? Would this work? Any other suggestions? Thanks.

actually, nevermind. I didn't see you wanted to keep the menu.

You could always use CCE to shrink the extras as well. That's what I normally do in this situation. Just treat the extras VTSs just as you would a multi-PGC movie (the Extras are usually multi-PGC). Do the movie first and see how small you can get it while staying below the line with the Robshot method. Then do the extras and use whatever quality level will fit.

jdobbs What I ended up doing was I had an 8 kb dummy vob file that I used. The vts_01 set, that included the extras, had 3 vob files, so I just copied the dummy vob file 3 times, named them accordingly and was able to encode my movie at a video bitrate of 5000 avg. using the robshot method. Turned out very nice and the dummy vobs worked in fooling the dvd.

hoops10, What happens if you try and select something from the menus that was in one of the VTSs you replaced?

jdobbs When I choose 'Bonus Materials', it takes me to another menu, like it should. Then when I select something, sometimes it goes right back to the menu, sometimes I get just a black screen. I would like to know how to make it so that when I select anything on the 'Bonus Materials' menu, it does nothing or puts me back to the original main menu. Any idea on how to do that?

If you rebuild the VTS VOB for the bonus materials, but just have, for example, one second segments of black video at a low bitrate replacing each original video stream, and delete all audio streams, then your VTS file will be tiny (<< 1 MB). What I do is recreate the desired VTS, with dummy entries for each PGC that correspond exactly to the original VTS. I then update it with IFOUpdate. The result is what you want -- the menu goes to the 1 second of blank video, then returns. Everything works. In theory, you could do this more elegantly by editing the menu commands to do nothing, but that requires actual thinking. The fake VTS VOB approach is fairly automatic. I hear about people using a zero-byte VOB, but I think that might produce an illegal command when the menu is selected.