Well, I finally fixed this DVD to my satisfaction and it can all be done with freeware or free-trial software. Here is how I did it in case anyone else wants to fix their own discs rather than trying to acquire Rowman’s fixed version.
Start by joining the 5 VOB files. I used “File Merger” (a tiny 84 KB general purpose freeware utility) to do this. I believe that it can also be done through the command line (CMD.exe). If you have DVD-lab you can drag and drop the first VOB into the assets box and it will offer to join the VOBs for you as well.
Then I used a program called “VideoReDo” (free trial, fully functional for the trial period with registration) which I found by clicking a link at the bottom of this forum. It has a big, non-resizable, fluffy GUI but it does its job well, i.e. deleting sections of video/audio on any frame in an MPG/VOB file and saving without having to reencode. Just select the first black frame in the 4 second black screen as the start point of the selection, and the first frame that shows Leia welding as the end point of the selection and then press your delete key on the keyboard. Anyone familiar with Vdub will have no trouble using this program.
I saved the file as an MPG and then used MPEG-VCR V3.14’s “GOP Fixer” on the file (steps 1 and 2). I don’t know if this was necessary or not but it did find and fix a lot of GOP time code errors which I suspect was a result of the cutting out of the black screen earlier.
Then you can open the file again in VideoReDo and save as elementary streams (WAV and MPV), or any other method you care to use to demux.
Open the WAV file in an audio editor. I used GoldWave which is shareware. The same thing can be done with Audacity (open source freeware) or if you have Nero Ultra, that comes with a pretty good wave editor as part of the suite. Move your start selection to about 50m 31s or so (press play and listen for the sound of Leia welding to get the exact point) and your end selection a second or two after that and zoom in. Keep zooming in until you can clearly see a .058 second long “flatline” at the “C3PO-to-Leia welding scene” transition. Delete that gap of silence that shouldn’t be there and then save your changes.
Load the MPV and the WAV into Muxman (free for the basic version) and load this chapter list:
003447
014946
027067
032677
040223
045343
056331
065127
074462
080757
093726
108663
118691
132823
139846
147538
157127
167898
178759
194683
206169
212609
216519
And select the save location and click start and that is all there is to it. The results are perfect and there is no quality loss because nothing gets re-encoded. The black is completely gone and because of the frame-accurate editing of VideoReDo, you don’t lose any frames that are supposed to be there. The chapter list is accurate relative to the unaltered TR47 DVD. It is 4 seconds off for the chapters that fall past the edit once you remove the black screen. This could be adjusted in the list itself if anyone wanted to*.
*<span class=“Italics”>Edited to replace the chapter list that was 4 seconds off after the cut, with an adjusted chapter list.</span>