The VOB joining question !

mel58i wrote on 2/24/2009, 2:51 AM
I did have a dvd movie file on my pc taken from a disc (which I no longer have). Somehow or other the only files remaining are the VOB's (the IFO's etc seem to have gone).
I tried to join these VOB's using apps like vegas and womble to rebuild a MPEG2 file to re-author but always at the join there is a glitch !
I have seen this before, but could never fathom it out - when given the complete titleset with the IFO's etc the joins are seamless.
It seems as though that in a complete titleset the IFO's change VOB's slightly before the end of one and slightly after the start of the next.
Am I right in this thinking, and is there a way to join VOB's seamlessly ?

Mel.

Comments

farss wrote on 2/24/2009, 4:02 AM
Have you tried using DVD Shrink?

Hard to imagine the IFOs are gone, I think without them the DVD would be unplayable.

Bob.
newhope wrote on 2/24/2009, 4:33 AM
I'd recommend MPEG2 Works 4 as it stitches VOB files together quite neatly.... but it only runs on a Mac unfortunately.

Not sure of any equivalent for PC but one would suspect there'd have to be one.

New Hope Media
mel58i wrote on 2/24/2009, 4:45 AM
Looking into it further, it seems that only the first VOB in the sequence contains a header - when I try to import the second VOB the app seems to be scanning this VOB to try to determine its length - sometimes it gets the length wildly wrong.
When you think about it, if the authoring program just splits the MPEG2 file into 1GB chunks, then the file header will only be in the first VOB.
Now how do I put a header into every VOB if this is the case ?
craftech wrote on 2/24/2009, 5:20 AM
You can join the VOBs using the freeware utility VobMerge.

John
MozartMan wrote on 2/24/2009, 7:23 AM
There is another utility VOB2MPG:

http://www.videohelp.com/tools/VOB2MPG
rs170a wrote on 2/24/2009, 7:48 AM
Audio gaps in imported DVD files.
The reply by John Meyer spells out how to join these files seamlessly.

Mike
blink3times wrote on 2/24/2009, 8:53 AM
While it is true that vob's are mpeg's they can be a little tricky because they CAN contain multiple audio tracks, subtitle tracks...etc, and which track plays by default depends on how they were assigned.

Your best bet is probably to demux the vob into separate audio/ video tracks and then import to Vegas and rebuild.

I'm pretty sure that the newer versions of either TSmuxer and/or TSremuxer (both free downloads) will recognize and demux vob files.
earthrisers wrote on 2/24/2009, 5:32 PM
Wanna give another thanks to JohnMeyer...

I thanked you a few months ago for a DVD-Shrink step-by-step solution to the VOB-gap problem.
Used your instructions again just now, working on a set of videoclips of football games in which my grandson quarterbacks -- very successful import of the pertinent DVD, thanks to DVD-Shrink & thanks to JohnMeyer's instructions.
So thanks *again*
mel58i wrote on 2/25/2009, 4:39 AM
While we're on about "thanks" - must say it for craftech for the VOBmerge. Fantastic little utility that does what it says on the tin.

Mel.
sheelz321 wrote on 2/25/2009, 11:08 AM
I use MPEG Streamclip, but Windows users have to either

1 uninstall quicktime and install quicktime alternative 1.8

2 keep quicktime and buy an MPEG 2 Player plugin from Apple
farss wrote on 2/28/2009, 7:51 PM
"While we're on about "thanks" - must say it for craftech for the VOBmerge. Fantastic little utility that does what it says on the tin."

I'll add my voice to that as well.
Last night I had to re-author a DVD I'd made some time ago and as luck would have it one of the titles was split over two VOBs. VOBmerge fixed that in seconds and DVDA happily swallowed the joined VOB.

VOBmerge is also much easier to use than DVDShrink, not to take anything away from DVDshrink as it has other uses but if I need to simply join VOBs VOBmerge will be my tool of choice from now on.

Bob.
mel58i wrote on 3/2/2009, 2:35 AM
While on about VOBmerge, it has one little downfall - both source and destination must be on the same drive, otherwise it throws up an error of insufficient memory available. This is something that has been mentioned before on the 'net' in general.
So simple to use and a 'goodun'

Mel.