My mother has a couple of DVD's which contain awful quality family footage shot over twenty years ago. The DVD's are new and the footage was transferred by a company, however she can't play them and they wouldn't play on my Mac, VLC wouldn't work but MPEG Streamclip was able to open the VIDEO_TS.VOB files. My question is, given the long list of export options for MPEG Streamclip, which is most suitable?

Obviously this is not a professional query but I just need to convert the DVD's onto a format which I can edit on and which can be re-burned onto DVD for future family viewing.

Thanks in advance,

Cameron.

I'm guessing you have PAL 25 footage originally? I think -- others may have more information and other suggestions, but I believe the DV choice, matched to the original frame size and rate, would do the least damage to the file....or an uncompressed AVI file, perhaps....

The original tapes definitely would have been PAL VHS. No idea what the original frame size and rate would have been but I will try the DV option and see how it goes, thanks.

There is a default dv25 setting under the dv option, I think that's it. I have used the plain-vanilla dv to translate NTSC video for editing from dv originals with good success, so this looks like a good option.

You should be able to do a "save as" and it will re-wrap the VOB files as MPEG 2 files without any additional encoding. This will have the best quality as the important bits will be untouched.

I often use Streamclip for a similar purpose. I have a DVD recorder that can record and pause recording from broadcast TV. Unfortunately, the timecodes are all chopped up and the VOB files won't play. Streamclip is able to repair the timecodes. I then save the files without re-encoding and can view/edit the content from there.

Agreed, "Save As..." works splendidly for this purpose. I've recovered a great number of messed-up DVD's (or converted them for media server hosting) with this option.

Definitely Save as MPEG if you just want to put the video on another DVD! Any other option will re-encode the already weak video.

But now, if your intention is to enhance the video, then DV might be better, as it will create an all I-frame file.