edl works *great* with cars at 15 minutes, and appears to at an hour, too.  Oh, and the audio matches perfectly.

The kicker is that if I want to watch the "unedited all" option in mplayer (which I do for the "quick start" mode), then it needs to be as is...

audio_codec = these_settings['audio_codec'] || 'lavc' # not copy...sniff...or you can't hear cars...as ffmpeg loses it on transfer [?] at least the intermediates you *cannot* hear.

HP with edl (only) seriously fails at the 2 hour mark, even with 5 seconds added, or seems to, at least.

windows media player is able to playback the "fulli" that mplayer gets out of sync on (lavc audio), at least with cars.

mplayer dvd://23 -dvd-device e:\ -edl C:\Users\packrd\AppData\Local\Temp\mplayer.temp.edl
  seems to play with audio in sync always, with cars (now with potter...)

what if you grab with "full" audio...does it make its way back out to the DVD? what does dvd flick do audio wise?

without harddup smplayer got audio video out of sync playing DVD, as well as playing ripped files, however
  when you wrote those to DVD, they seemed to get back in sync. ffmpeg, perhaps, is/was fixing them?

fulli with lavc audio and video: mplayer cannot play it back right, but if it's re-encoded with mencoder first [? or is it ffmpeg?], mplayer
seems to play it fine then. Thin ice here...

if I pull from dvd with -acodec lavc (basically downgrade to stereo), then ffmpeg can extract to avi with sound.
  otherwise (cars only), it lacks sound *only on computer players*

Note that mencoder cannot have an endpos on a dvd. Weird.

Note that dvdflick "appears" to encode correctly even if the size is too big, as in it just encodes it "lossy-y"
  The encoding actually appears to be fairly high quality, that dvd flick does, video wise, at least.

ffmpeg -i bigg.mpg -acodec copy -vcodec copy bigg.reindexffmpeg.mpg

resulted in a sound with no audio

I got bigg trying to combine (mencoder ?) two large files.

I think bigg has honestly messed up audio, no reindexing seems to help it, at all.