Mac: Consolidating .VOB files
 

Hey guys so I've never really bothered with the whole ripping DVDs thing before but I tried it recently because I saw Battle Royale and wanted to save it before giving it back to my friends. I ripped it with MactheRipper and while that was a painless process I'm now sorta stuck with the main feature streched across 4 .vob files. And I was wondering if theres any application that can jsut combine these into one file, preferably an avi.

So you want a transcoding application. Why not just rip directly to AVI DivX using a piece of software like Handbrake? You can rip straight from the DVD to a DivX file without ever having to rip the VOB files to disk. Or you could use ffmpegX to compress them.

I have been fooled into thinking that macTheRipper was good! Time to get Handbrake!
(And cheers.)

MacTheRipper is really for just making copies. Rip, decrypt, strip region encoding, and make copies for all your friends.

Yeah, MactheRipper isn't bad, just used for different things, i.e. when you need the VOB files for some particular reason. HandBrake is quite useful though, as a one-step compression utility.

And, why DivX AVI anyway? C'mon now, this is the future! H.264 with AAC audio in an MP4 container!

AMEN!

And: MacTheRipper is great when you have to give in DVD's really quick and have no time to do the encoding straight from the disk. Like when renting new dvd's that have to be returned the day after... Or in your case, when you had to give the movie back immediately. Use it as a middleman.

Just wanted to palm it off to a mate and such high technology would scare him.

So Basically MactheRipper creates a copy that's then made for burning back to DVD? I understand now.

Or anything else. It decrypts the original VOB files (MPEG-2 + audio + subtitles) and sets them on your HD to do with them what you will. Perhaps you want to extract subtitles to a text file. Maybe you want to demux the audio and video and just use one or the other. Maybe you want to convert to some odd format HandBrake doesn't support by using ffmpegX. There could be a lot of reasons to use MacTheRipper.

Maybe you know how to extract the subtitles from the VOB files so I can then combine them with my H.264 .MP4 file? This way I can choose when I use subs or not. Although I don't really think it's possible to do so using quicktime as your MP4 player...

Right now, when I need subs, I just encode them directly onto the videotrack. It works really well using handbrake, but ofcourse then I no longer have the choice whether or not I want to use subtitles... :-s

Double Post:
Actually, I have another question... Handbrake doesn't want to encode dvd's where only the main .VOB files are available. It says it can't find any title... Only when I do a full dvd rip, it can find the titles to encode... But the .VOB files I have contain the full movie... Any solution for that problem?

I use D-Subtitler to do OCR of DVD subtitles out to a text file. It can save 'em in a couple different formats. As to how to mux 'em into an MP4 file for softsubs in VLC or somesuch... I haven't done that before. I'm sure there's a way, but I'm not familiar with it.

As for your second question, I'm not sure what you mean. Do you mean you have ripped VOB files that Handbrake won't rip from? Because, no, it won't. You need an actual authored DVD to use Handbrake. For main-title VOB files only use something like ffmpegX.

yeah that's what I mean... Pity :-(