VOB to MPEG Converter

[Charles]

I would have thought this had been discussed but I'm having no joy with the search feature. What's the good, free VOB to MPEG converter for Windows? My preference is something that runs from the command line.

Thanks.

[Jeff Mott]

FFmpeg is the bread-and-butter for video and audio encoding.

http://www.ffmpeg.org/ffmpeg-doc.html#SEC5

[Charles]

Thanks. There was an unacceptable drop in quality, though. Any ideas?

[Jeff Mott]

You can adjust the options for the output video quality. "-b 800k", for example, is setting the bitrate to 800 Kbps. You can increase that. You can also tell the encoder to perform two passes: "-pass 2". Two passes lets the encoder analyze the video in the first pass to find the high and low motion parts so that it can more intelligently distribute the bits in the second pass. In other words, high motion (action) scenes will be allocated more bits than low motion scenes.

Or you can go another way. You can set a fixed quality and let the bitrate vary (VBR). For that, take out "-b 800k" and put in "-qscale 4". The qscale value can be anywhere between 1 and 31, where smaller numbers means higher video quality.

There are also options for cropping and resizing if you want to get into that.

[Charles]

Fantastic, thanks. I did look about trying to find a good tutorial. I'm sure it's out there but I didn't find it. And the world thanks you. This is for a very big, very important environmental project.

[David Harrison]

Hm, I don't believe transcoding should be necessary unless the VOB was unacceptably large. VOB files basically contain MPEG video anyway.

I don't even think it needs to be remuxed unless it has AC3 or DTS audio which can be converted to just about anything you want, if it only contains MP2 audio then simply changing the file extension from .vob to .mpg will do it. If there are multiple VOB files though then remuxing would be required. I'm sure there are some utilities on this list (http://www.doom9.org/index.html?/software.htm) that can handle demuxing and remuxing of VOB/MPG files.

If file size is an issue, then the way to go would be conversion to H.264, for which there is the rather brilliant (if complicated) x264 (http://x264.nl/) utility, and there are many converters to AAC for audio, personally I use eac3to (http://www.videohelp.com/tools/eac3to) with the Nero AAC encoder.

I would strongly recommend using a GUI for x264 video conversion though, MeGUI (http://sourceforge.net/projects/megui) is rather excellent, and the built in Sharktooth profiles are quite good. Staxrip (http://www.planetdvb.net/staxrip/) is also good, especially so for conversion of DVDs, and it uses the same profiles and x264 utility that MeGUI does.

Generally speaking, the order I use is:
* demux to separate video and audio streams
* encode audio with eac3to
* subtract audio size from desired file size, calculate a target bitrate for video from this based on the length of the video
* encode video in MeGUI at slightly less than the target bitrate
* remux to a suitable container format, I use MKV, but MP4 would work too

The .mpg file format won't work with any of the MPEG 4 video or audio standards, so if you're really dead set on that then MPEG2 video and LAME encoded MP3 audio are the way to go.

[alberttbaits]

Do you try format factory?
or handbrake