Last night I was presented with a DVD-RW that had a recording (of a portion of a local television news broadcast) created with a DVD video recorder. I've heard people talk about not being able to play these disks in other devices (such as computers or regular DVD players). I slapped it into my MacBook Pro and, when it mounted almost immediately on my Desktop, I thought I was home free. Not so much.
The mounted volume contained one folder that appeared to be locked (it had the "locked" badge on it). I could open it in the Finder, but it appeared to contain no files. I launched Terminal and cd'ed into the folder. When I tried to ls, I was told I had insuffiecient privileges. A quick sudo (via !!) later I was greeted with two files: VR_MOVIE.INF and VR_MOVIE.VRO. The first of these was something like 16KB, while the other was just over 1GB. Bingo. But no. All attempts to copy the .VRO file were in vain.
I tried VLC, Handbrake, Mac the Ripper, DVD Player, Disk Utility, iSquint, and maybe a couple other things ... all to no avail.
I finally decided to try Toast and just burn a copy of the thing for later. Toast recognized the DVD, but informed me that I was not allowed to copy it. Toast also displayed a hint that I could add the titles via the Video -> Media tab. Sure enough, there is a pop-up menu in the media drawer that allows you to specify DVD. When I switched to that, I was presented with a list of chapters. I was able to grab the chapter I wanted and rip it directly to a Toast DVD image. Once the resulting image was mounted, it contained the standard VIDEO_TS folder and played normally in QuickTime Player. I was then able to transcode the chapter with HandBrake.
So there you have it. If you want to get video data off a DVD recorded in a DVD video recorder, Toast is the way to go.
Mac OS X Hints
http://hints.macworld.com/article.php?story=20061124153410554