Ripping video from a DVD

[Patrick McAvoy]

My company is celebrating their 80th year selling Caterpillar tractors this year, because of this they had the head of Caterpillar shoot a "thank you" video that they now want me to rip and put into our own 80th anniversary video.

Any ideas how I can pull the footage from the DVD? I'm guessing I'll need a special software for it. Final Cut Express can't do it right? I've never tried taking something off of a finished DVD. If you open the DVD folder it lists a couple files with .BUP, .IFO, .VOB file names but that doesn't mean anything to me. Can anybody with experience in this lend a hand? Thanks!

I'm using a Mac OS X 10.4.9 with Final Cut Express HD 3.0.

[Ervin Farkas]

What you need is the .vob files, which are the actual video files. Some NLEs will import them as they are, for others (Premiere Pro for example) you need to change the .vob extension to .mpg and it will work fine - I am not sure if you need to do this, I am not familiar with FC or any other Mac software. Beware of the quality though... you will more than likely get compression artifacts and generally a lower quality. Best thing would be to acquire the original tape and work off of that, not the DVD.

Now, if the DVD is copy protected, then you're up for some real work, but it can be done... it's probably not the case since the DVD was done at your request.

In case you don't need any editing done on it, keep the file as it is and incorporate it into your final product - I assume that would be also a DVD. You may need to either change the extension to mpg or use MPEG Streamclip (free, availble for both Windows and OSX) to turn your .vob into a .mpg.

[Chuck Wall]

Hi
Google vobedit it will convert the vobs back to elementary audio/video streams.

Chuck

[Patrick McAvoy]

Thanks for the help guys, is there a Mac version of vobedit?

[Steven Cowie]

mpegstreamclip should do the trick (well the PC version does so I expect the mac version will too)

just copy the vob files over from the disc to your hard disk and have streamclip save as mpegs

DVDs are split into title sets with corresponding vob file names

eg VTS_01_0.VOB, VTS_01_1.VOB VTS_01_2.VOB VTS_01_03.VOB are all part of the same title set (eg a single 3GB program split into 1 GB chunks)

you should usually avoid any VOBs that end _0.VOB (eg VTS_01_0.VOB) as those are usually just menu information

for a DVD with several VOBs in a title set you can select them all in streamclip (ignoring the vob that ends _0.VOB) in one go and have it write out a single combined file, or you can load each individually (eg VTS_01_1.VOB) and create a seperate mpeg for each in turn.

[Djee Smit]

mpeg streamclip does the trick well on a mac, I have done it several times

[Patrick McAvoy]

mpeg streamclip did the job! Thanks guys, couldn't have done it without you.