Tong Family

OK, I need to get a bunch of my home movies from their DVD .VOB format back into a long .MPG file so that I can make H.264 files for iPod Video. As usual, there are a zillion formats and it is hard to figure out the easiest way to do it. Here is the hairbrained way that I found:

* “Engadget”:http://www.engadget.com/2005/10/14/how-to-convert-a-dvd-for-your-ipod-with-video-in-windows/ has a tutorial on this. First you use “DVDx”:http://www.labdv.com/dvdx/ whcih lets you convert a DVD’s .VOB files. This does require you to understand various settings

An easy way that results in no loss when you go from DVD to MPEG2 is to:

* “VOB Merge”:http:// . It turns out that DVDs had for a long time a 1GB file limit, so .VOBs are limited to that. You use VOBMerge to do the equivalent of a binary concatenate. You literally copy all the VOB files together. In DOS, it would be like _copy /b file1.vob+file2.vob file”
* “Videora”:http://videora. If you just have the raw .VOB that has the MPEG2 stream, then here’s an easy way, this freeware utility takes a .MPEG2 file and converts into the very efficient .H264 format that iPod Video uses.