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midwinter · Sep 5, 2004, 04:04 AM

I have about 100 DVDs I've made with my Eye TV (by capturing video from cable and burning it to DVD), and now I find myself, after purchasing an EyeHome and a large hard drive, wanting to get these DVDs back on my hard drive.

Here's the deal:

The DVD folders are, usually, 1 GB and ~400 MB.

0sex crashes.

MactheRipper produces two vob folders.

I need ONE file.

Any help? I don't want to convert this to .avi, since the video is already MPEG-1. I just want to get EITHER a single VOB off these DVDs or a single MPEG-1 file off them.

Thanks in asvance.

Spheric Harlot · Sep 5, 2004, 05:36 AM

DVDs are MPEG-2, AFAIK.

Since the stuff you burned yourself is neither region-coded nor CSS-encrypted, why not just grab the files off the DVD in Finder and be done with it?

Am I missing something?

VEGAN · Sep 5, 2004, 08:40 AM

Originally posted by Spheric Harlot:
DVDs are MPEG-2, AFAIK.

Since the stuff you burned yourself is neither region-coded nor CSS-encrypted, why not just grab the files off the DVD in Finder and be done with it?

Am I missing something?

DVD can be of mpeg-1 or mpeg-2 video. Both are OK.

How about DVDBackup? Did that work?

midwinter · Sep 5, 2004, 03:34 PM

Originally posted by Spheric Harlot:
DVDs are MPEG-2, AFAIK.

Since the stuff you burned yourself is neither region-coded nor CSS-encrypted, why not just grab the files off the DVD in Finder and be done with it?

Am I missing something?

The problem is that I wind up with two .vob files, one about 1 GB and one about 400 MB. I need a single .vob.

Trying DVDbackup now.

midwinter · Sep 5, 2004, 03:49 PM

DVDBackup gave me multiple files. Trying MacTheRipper again now, which looks like it's going to work.

And oof. I sure wish I'd caught that typo in the thread title before I hit "submit." Dammit. 3:00 am and too much bourbon.

midwinter · Sep 5, 2004, 04:21 PM

Mactheripper does it fine. Title-only extraction.

Uncle Skeleton · Sep 6, 2004, 10:18 AM

VOB files are on the short list of formats that can be combined just by appending one to the next (use 'cat' in the terminal)

threestain · Sep 7, 2004, 11:03 AM

so does the cat command append one file (ie any file) onto the next?

leperkuhn · Sep 7, 2004, 02:40 PM

Originally posted by midwinter:
DVDBackup gave me multiple files. Trying MacTheRipper again now, which looks like it's going to work.

And oof. I sure wish I'd caught that typo in the thread title before I hit "submit." Dammit. 3:00 am and too much bourbon.

ah yes, getting wasted and posting questions on MacNN...

typoon · Sep 7, 2004, 03:01 PM

I believe the Program is called Openshiiva. it is supposed to be able to combine .VOB files. Also I use Handbrake. it makes them on nice easy MP4 file.

Uncle Skeleton · Sep 7, 2004, 07:54 PM

Originally posted by threestain:
so does the cat command append one file (ie any file) onto the next?

It's used for that (conCATinate), but all it really does is puke out the entire contents of the file to std out. You use > to dump that to a new file instead, and just give cat multiple input files to dump them all to that file (in alphabetical order). And make sure the output file doesn't fullfill any wildcards you use for the input files; eg, cat *.txt > output.txt will create an infinite loop, appending the output to itself.

I believe the Program is called Openshiiva. it is supposed to be able to combine .VOB files. Also I use Handbrake. it makes them on nice easy MP4 file.

Midwinter neglected to explicitly state this today, but based on his history of threads regarding EyeTV and multimedia jukeboxing, I'm pretty certain he's not interested in re-encoding anything.

midwinter · Sep 7, 2004, 08:11 PM

Originally posted by Uncle Skeleton:
Midwinter neglected to explicitly state this today, but based on his history of threads regarding EyeTV and multimedia jukeboxing, I'm pretty certain he's not interested in re-encoding anything.

Bingo. The point here is that the Eye TV creates MPEG-1 video, which Toast will multiplex and burn as a DVD playable in most commercial players. Now what I'm finding is that we rarely walk all the way across the room, pick out a DVD, walk over to the player, put it in, move through the menus, etc. We just flip to whatever's on the Eye Home downstairs and fire it up. An app like OpenShiiva would be great, but why waste time re-encoding when the Eye Home will play the .vob files?

As it turns out, I'm going to reencode a lot of this video as .mp4 (using ffmpegx) to save space. The quality is largely the same and the file size is about 1/3 of the original.

Cheers
Scott

PS: does anyone know if there's a way to set up a kind of "batch" in ffmpegx? That is, can I tell it to just encode all of the video in a folder? I know it won't do it all at once (which would be stupid), but it'd be nice to stick a bunch of files in there and say "make all of these mp4" and walk away and let it do its thing.

threestain · Sep 8, 2004, 06:17 AM

the latest versions of ffmpegx let you do queues - you have to individually set them up (really easy) and then it'll go through the queue as and when its done. very handy I find!

midwinter · Sep 8, 2004, 09:18 AM

Originally posted by threestain:
the latest versions of ffmpegx let you do queues - you have to individually set them up (really easy) and then it'll go through the queue as and when its done. very handy I find!

Someone else mentioned that to me. How do you do it?

midwinter · Sep 8, 2004, 10:39 AM

Nevermind. Figured it out.