I haven’t ripped a DVD in a very long time, but sometimes I see these VOB files. I have used Handbrake in the past to get my old DVDs of the kids over to a modern format, but somehow the latest Handbrake fails me and stops after the first segment. Sigh.
So onto looking for a new tool that works so here’s the alternative path:

  1. MKVTooINixMKVTooINix. This takes the 1G .VOB files and stuffs them into a single MKV container. The Handbrake seems to fail along the VOB boundaries. As a refresher, the original DVD file format had a 1GB per file limit, so movies were split into .VOB files. You have to find the right file names, typically 01_0x.VOB and then open them in this tool. It then produces a single huge Matrovska file. With the MPEG-2 encoding used in DVDs, a 2 hour movie would be about 11GB. A typical DVD would be 720×480
  2. Handbrake to transcode to X.265. Once you have this MKV file, you can use Handbrake to encode it in X.265. This is about 2x better than X.264 which is in turn about 4x better than MPEG-2. Net, net your 11GB file should

I’m Rich & Co.

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