Splicing video

May I join in here?
I assume you started with a commercial DVD. That being so if you open the DVD you will see two Folders AUDIO_TS and VIDEO_TS. The Audio one is empty but the video folder will contain IFO, BUP and VOB files. The VOB files are the ones you need. Transfer them to your hard drive. There may be a few smaller files but there should be a block of 3 or 4 files. 2 or 3 of them will be 1,048,404 Kb that being the maximum that a VOB file will take and one a smaller size making up the total for the video. The smaller files may be menu, trailers to other films, adverts etc.
The VOB extension is really not a format but a container for an MPEG file. If you rename the VOB's to .mpg then import them into a video editor in the order they are on the DVD, you will then be able to create an mpg file of the whole lot. This can be anything up to 4.7Gb in size. If you stick to mpg throughout and where possible tell the video editor to NOT re-render compliant mpg files you will keep rendering to an absolute minimum and thereby retain the best video quality.
If you can't transfer the files from the DVD then the disc is encrypted so it could be argued that you should not be copying it anyway.

Are you encoding directly from the disc?

I agree your better off copying the disc to your HD, then encode it from there.
Ive never had a dvd encode into several pieces like this. Its a bit odd.


You may also wish to try ripping just the Main movie to the HD, and then choose the very first .VOB that .99 GB in size as the start point when you encode it, (in the Video TS folder)

It should, link the rest together automatically creating 1 single file.

seekermeister said:

The output from a movie that I just encoded, came out atypically, in that instead of a single file, it had four, as seen in the screenshot. Of course, I can play the sections together as a batch, but for reasons that don't see any point in going into, I want to splice these sections into one file as they should be.

After a bit of Googling, it seemed that the common answer to this problem was to use Windows Movie Maker, but of course, in W7 that means Windows Live Movie Maker (don't know if there is a difference or not?).

When selecting that wlmp file, all that it does is to reopen the files in WLMM, where it will play the files in sequence, but is notin a fashion usable in VLC. How does one create a TRUE splice, useable in any player of choice?

What you have done in WLM is to save your project as a wimp file which you can only open in WLM. What you need to do is save the movie as a wmf file. This can be done by pressing the save movie button near the top right corner. You can select different qualities of file in the dropdown (press the down arrow) or just accept the default(press the icon). Once selected a file save dialog will appear so that you can name your movie, then in will proceed to encode the movie as a wmf file. This can take some time so be patient. After completion you can play this file in any player that supports wmf files. Oh you don't actually have to save the project if you don't want to unless you want to make further changes to it later.

I think I must be missing the point here. I thought seekermeister was trying to create a file just to play on his PC. The VOB are already MPEG files to why is it necessary to encode/render them to a different format? This always leads to a certain loss of quality. A mpg file will play on all the regular players that we use!

Then just rename the four VOB files to the .mpg extension. Import them into Windows movie maker and save that to one mpg file! Do you have a video editor installed? If so we can use that.

seekermeister said:

If by video editor, you mean Windows Live Movie Maker, then yes. I copy/pasted the sections to the hard drive, renamed them to an mpg extension, loaded the sections into WLMM and then selected Save Movie. I do not yet know how well this will work, because it has already been saving for ~40 minutes, and still has 50% of the file to go. It sure seems like a lot of time just to save a file, since I assume that it is not doing anything else. I did notice that even though I renamed the sections to mpg, it changed them again to wmf, which I do not want. Can I simply return it to a mpg extension after it is complete?

Since I just copy/pasted the sections, I also assume that the encryption is still there, so it makes me wonder what the purpose of the encryption is...just to prevent copying to another blank DVD?

WLM always saves the movie as wmf. You have no choice here. Depending on how big the files are it can take several hours. If you want a choice of file format use Any Video Converter. You can use this directly from the VOB files. Free Video Converter - Any Video Converter Free Version - convert video to any formats, avi to MPEG, avi to MP4, flv to MPG