Me too. Once in a while I have too. Never found a pattern though. Some times you can get it by use another app. to convert and then import the converted media.

/Ulf

does this instantly ring a bell with anyone, especially with anyone who might have some clues as to why it's happening?Yup, it happens all the time and is due to how one VOB file ends and the other begins. The reason that some people have the problem and others don't has to do with what is on the DVD, and more specifically, how the VOB files in each titleset are structured.

Here's the solution.

If you want to put VOB files into Vegas, then I strongly suggest you use DVD Shrink to first put those VOB files onto your hard drive. This has nothing to do with breaking encryption (you are supposed to only edit material you own). Instead, it has to do with DVD Shrink's ability to join all VOBs together, and to eliminate the extra streams (audio tracks and subtitles and angles) which Vegas doesn't know how to handle..

So, open the disc in DVD Shrink. Specify a destination. Go to Edit -> Preferences and on the Output Files tab make sure that "Split VOB files ..." is NOT checked.



Then, click on the "Re-author" button. On the right side of the screen, select the DVD Browser and drag the titlesets from your DVD from the right screen to the left screen.



Then, click on the Compression Settings tab. Click on each titleset in the left pane, and you should see for that titleset all the streams associated with it. Uncheck all audio streams except the one you want, and uncheck ALL subtitle streams (the example below doesn't have subtitle streams, but if it did, they should ALL be unchecked).



Then, click on Backup, specify a destination and make sure that you tell DVD Shrink not to do any shrinking (which if you are copying from a 4.7GB DVD, it will not do).

You will now have one single VOB file which Vegas should like. There should be no audio glitches or gaps, and the audio length should match the video length. You should be able to drop this onto the Vegas timeline and edit with no problems.

This issue comes up all the time. I hope this helps people finally be able to edit their own DVDs with Vegas.

If you don't have Vegas 8 and want to do lossless editing of the resulting Vegas, you might want to check out this old post of mine, which shows how to transfer your edits in Vegas directly to Womble, which will then use the Vegas EDL to perform lossless editing of the the MPEG-2 file and AC-3 file (although it will do recompression at the edit points if they don't happen to fall on GOP boundaries).

Vegas to Womble Utility


[edit] Well, I guess I wasted my time doing this tuturial ... time I could be spending somewhere else ...

Just in case your "wasting your time" comment was a result of delayed thank-you messages here (I was away for a while), then...

THANK YOU!
THANK YOU!
THANK YOU!


not kidding...

You're welcome. I hope it helped.

I don't usually "bump" threads but this one is worth everyone's notice - again.

I got a chance to test the DVD Shrink method of importing one long VOB into Vegas, and oh wow does it work! Gone are the audio gaps, missing or repeated frames, and sync issues.

If you are careful to do it the way John says you get a full quality video file just like the original that can be edited in Vegas and / or authored in DVDA.

The only thing I would add is that you may want to uncheck the 5.1 audio track in DVD Shrink if it is there, because Vegas may choke or get confused over surround imported from who-knows-where. Other than that, this method works like a charm!

I couldn't agree more. I took John's advice and used DVD Shrink and it did everything I wanted. John's the man!

Richard

"Well, I guess I wasted my time doing this tuturial ... time I could be spending somewhere else ..."

How many times has this question been answered this year?
Surely SCS or someone can devise a wikki or something to avoid the same questions recurring over and over.

Bob.

John,
here's a curly one. I have a DVD authored in iDVD that refuses to play nice with DVD Shrink. It's a simple slide show only 11:38 long. Problem is it's comprised of 5 titlesets each with it's own small VOB file. DVD plays out as one would expect.
I can't find a way to get DVD Shrink to join the titlesets together into one VOB which is frustrating as it'll happily join all the VOBs from one titleset.
Any clues much appreciated. I don't want to reuse this DVD's contents, just be able to put it as one piece onto the Vegas T/L for comparison. Even taking the native VOBs into Vegas is a mess, one of them has an audio stream 3 times longer than the vision stream.

Bob.

Hi,

>I can't find a way to get DVD Shrink to join the titlesets together into one VOB which is frustrating as it'll happily join all the VOBs from one titleset.<

to be honest I do not know of any applications which would combine VOBs from different title sets into one single file.

I'm always recommending PgcDemux for DVD extraction purposes (freeware, works with non-protected disks only). It will produce elementary files only. However, you could extract all title sets with it and import the elementaries into Vegas. You could as well make use of a muxer like the ImagoMPEGMuxer to produce MPGs out of the elementaries beforehand.

Cheers

darkframe

I just tried a few things to see if I could combine them, but not surprisingly, it doesn't work.

I say "not surprisingly" because VOBs from different titlesets can have -- and almost certainly will have -- entirely different characteristics: aspect ratio, bitrate, pixel dimensions, audio, etc. The MPEG spec does allow some of these to vary within a continuous MPEG-2 bitstream but some -- like aspect ratio -- I don't think can change.

I just spent a LOT of time yesterday on a related issue, where someone gave me several thousand football plays on seven discs and wanted a highlight reel. The problem is that some were taken with a 4:3 camera, and most were taken with a 16:9 camera. Each play was a separate scene. If I had done a normal import, I would have ended up with a few huge VOB files for each disc, and no easy way to access each scene in Vegas. So, I used DVD Decrypter to copy each disc, and told it to create a new VOB file for each scene. Thus, I ended up with a new VOB file for each play. The coach had gone through the discs, and noted the title and chapter number for each play, and what game they were from. I used a file renamer utility to rename the VOB file to match his notation.

The rest was child's play.

However, here's where I ran up against almost the same problem you are trying to solve. I then tried to render my timeline of 4:3 and 16:9 plays out to a DVD. I initially rendered to 16:9, but found that the 4:3 segments ended up with bars on the sides AND bars on top and bottom. On a 4:3 monitor it looks like a shrunk version of the original video, centered in the screen. It took me awhile to figure out why that happens, and obviously it is what happens when you render 4:3 to a 16:9 DVD.

I then tried rendering to 4:3 and on my 4:3 monitor everything looked fine. However, it wasn't until I looked closely that I realized that the 16:9 footage had been degraded. So, I tried using Womble to combine the clips (I've posted before how to transfer the Vegas cuts-only edit list to Womble). However, this ended up stretching the 4:3 to fit 16:9.

This is what makes me believe that MPEG-2 doesn't let you embed an aspect ratio change flag within the MPEG-2 stream itself. And I think it is why most utilities don't combine the VOBs from different titlesets.

Of course, you can call your mates at Womble and get MPEG-VCR. You can combine pretty much anything with that. However, if you combine VOBs within a given titleset, you may still get those audio gaps which were the original problem reported in this topic. And, if your different titlesets have different aspect ratios, you will end up with one aspect ratio either stretched or squished.

One final thought: Anything on different titlesets usually isn't continuous, and is already "separate." Thus, it normally shouldn't be a big deal to treat it as a separate file and author it that way in DVD Architect. Oh, and that reminds me: if the titlesets really are the same aspect ratio, etc., you can put them all in a "music compilation" in DVDA and get chapter-to-chapter navigation, all within a single titleset.

I'll try to look into this further, more to try to figure out the how and why than for any real need. A few points of interest.

This is a single title DVD with an opening menu with one button. You click that button and the motion graphics background moves itself off the screen and as smooth as silk the slide show starts and all 11 minutes of it plays out as smooth as silk to the end.

The VOB for the first titleset on the disk contains all the audio for the whole movie and only a small part of the vision. Looking at that on the Vegas T/L I get a couple of minutes of vision and 11 minutes of audio. The other VOBs contain their own vision and audio. The audio in them is a partial duplicate of the audio from the first VOB. The VOBs other than the first one have the audio starting mid cycle, you'd need to be sample accurate not to get a glitch when joining them up.

One reason I'm interested in all this is this DVD is made by iDVD. Apple have certainly got some serious mojo going on, the DVD when played looks a million bucks. The menu page is built from user images and text into sophisticated 3D motion graphics, think text and images wrapped around a rotating cylinder and it doesn't look cheesy. I need to rebuild the slideshow and obviously the client expects my efforts to look as good as what they can do with the free software that came with their Mac.

If you're interested ask someone with a latest Mac to make you a slideshow DVD with music using iDVD.

Bob.

Several years ago, I saw an iDVD demo and it was, as you say, stunning.

You mention that you only get a few minutes of video, but the entire eleven minutes of audio. I have seen this happen sometimes, even when I have DVD Shrink put everything into one file. I have not yet come up with a solution that involves only free software, but I have found that if I take that VOB, put it into Womble, and then have it create a MPEG file from that (which is a lossless copy, and definitely is not being re-encoded), that the audio and video are both the same length. I suspect that this is something which could be cured with one of the various VOB editing utilities. However, since Womble works and I have it, I have not had any incentive to find a simpler solution.

Hi,

@John and farss
Here's some more information for you:
The aspect ratio of an MPEG2 movie is normally laid down in the so-called sequence header. This is valid for MPG files as well as for VOBs.

Technical stuff:
In case you've got a hex editor you could look for the sequence header's start code which is $00 00 01 B3. The next three Bytes contain the horizontal and vertical size of the video frame. The first Byte and the first four Bits of the second Byte are carrying the horizontal size, the remaining total 12 Bits are indicating the vertical size. The next Byte, i.e. the fourth after the header contains the information about the aspect ratio (first four Bits) and the frame rate (last four Bits). If in the hex editor this Byte shows 2x (where x can be anything from 1 to 8, depending on the framerate) the aspect ratio is 4:3, if 3x is shown it's 16:9.

Back to life:
Now, the aspect ratio chosen for playback when watching a DVD is depending on the hardware or the software player. Software players often read the aspect ratio flag from the VOB itself while hardware players mainly rely on the information as laid down in the title sets' IFOs (VTS_xx_yy.IFO). As there's room for only one flag (4:3 or 16:9, never both) this explains why movies of different aspect ratio have to be placed into different VTSs. If you want to have movies of different aspect ratios on one DVD you therefore need to put all 16:9 material into one title set (VTS) and all 4:3 material into a different VTS to be sure that hardware players will show the correct aspect ratio.

In case you absolutely want to mix 16:9 and 4:3 material you need to do so in your NLE. Putting 4:3 into 16:9 leads to black bars left and right unless you're resizing, i.e. enlarging, the 4:3 material hence cutting of parts at the top and bottom.

The other way around parts at the left and right of 16:9 material would be cut off when trying to put that into a 4:3 movie while maintaining the vertical limits of 4:3. That's where "Panning & Cropping" comes into place. You could pan across the 16:9 material as you like to keep the relevant parts of the movie within the 4:3 frame and you won't have any black bars. You could as well zoom out of the 16:9 material so that it fits into the horizontal limits of the 4:3 frame. However, in that case you would get black bars at the top and bottom.

Regarding an extracted VOB which shows e.g. a video length of 1 minute while the accompanying audio is 6 minutes I'm rather sure that this is typical for slide shows on DVD (unless the slide show has been prepared as a movie).

Most DVD authoring software which is capable of producing slide shows on DVD from picture files (JPG or whatsoever) does not produce a movie out of the pictures but stores a single I-Frame for each picture only, together with an information in the IFO (!) for how long the I-Frame will be displayed when watching the slideshow. The only movie portions would be transitions between the pictures like fades and such. For those transitions a clip of the desired length would be produced and placed between the I-Frames of the single slides. It's almost the same as in the menu VOBs of a DVD when looking at static menus. Try extracting a VTS_0x_0.VOB and you'll see what I'm talking about (motion menus are a bit different).

Womble obviously creates full movies out of the single I-Frames by simply copying them. That can easily be done even without the IFOs as the software only needs to write copies of the I-Frame until it finds a new one in the VOB. Well, "easy" is probably not the right word here as in fact it's not trivial ;) I could however imagine that Womble does some kind of re-encoding, i.e., taking an I-Frame and producing B- and P-Frames to keep the file size a bit smaller. Whatsoever, the resulting MPG file should be a bit larger than the original VOB (John, just out of curiosity, could you check that please?).

Other applications like Shrink might have problems though as the programmer might not have thought of slideshows when writing the programme.

Hope that I could make myself clear and that the matter got a bit clearer to you.

Cheers

darkframe

There's some valuable information there, especially about aspect ratios however there's something I still don't understand and this goes back to a bug that used to exist in DVDA.
I created a simple menu using DVDA and used the text highlight option for my menus in my 16:9 PAL DVDs. All looked perfect on my 16:9 TV. All looked fine if I played them out to my 4:3 monitor without telling the player it was a 4:3 monitor. Tell the DVD player it was connected to a 4:3 device and all was fine, letterboxed as it should be except for the text highlights which I assume are encoded as overlays into the mpeg stream. They were all the wrong aspect ratio and did not line up with the text they were highlighting, quite a mess and a few clients who didn't have 16:9 TVs were not impressed.

What I cannot understand quite is how this could happen. From what you've said and what I understand there's information in the headers that define the AR for the whole file. If so how can some of the elements be 16:9 and others 4:3?

Bob.

Hi,

well, regarding highlights the matter is a bit different. When producing a 16:9 menu the highlights, or better, the subpictures representing the highlights will have to be prepared in both aspect ratios in order to make sure that they will be displayed correctly in case the 16:9 menu is shown on a 4:3 display.

This duplication of the subpicture in case of 16:9 menus is by the way the reason for the limitation to 18 buttons (or highlights) on a 16:9 menu while a 4:3 menu can have up to 36 buttons on one menu page as there's no need for a second subpicture set.

Unfortunately I'm not fit in DVDArchitect hence cannot tell you whether the additional subpicture will be created automatically or at all or whether a special setting is necessary somewhere. E.g. DVDLab is creating the second subpicture depending on the project settings (Automatic, Pan & Scan, Letterbox). Maybe there's a similar option in DVDArchitect as well.

Cheers

darkframe

Just came upon this thread yesterday after having the same audio glitch issue. I followed John's helpful advice and purchased DVD Shrink. When I clicked on the link to get to the download section of their site, I got a strange warning that it was an attack site and wouldn't let me log in. That was in FireFox. So I closed it, opened IE and got into the site, downloaded and installed the software, and now I have a virus/malware infection that is randomly redirecting all my Google search links to who knows where. My Fix-It Utilities scan/removal has yet to fix the problem.

Buyer beware.