How do I sucessfully convert VOB to MPG with no degradation?
 

I have a mini DVD movie I had taken when I was playing a gig, and now I want to take that VOB file and splice it into separate chapters/scenes, but all the apps I have tried have done nothing but either throw out the synchronization, distort the ratio, or omit the sound, or even, export only 35-40 seconds of audio, but video remains.

I have tried everything from ffmpeg(cli and gui version winFF), avidemux, lives, and DVbcut, not one of them is successfull, DVbcut exports the entire video between the start/stop markers, but with only 39 seconds of audio at the beginning.

avidemux doesn't recognize VOB files.
winFF doesn't have the ability to convert/transcode VOB to MPEG.

Lives throws everything out of sync and really mucks up the ratio.

As the movie of the gig was taken using a DVD camcorder, I even used DVD::rip to transcode to MPEG and MP3 audio, but, nope, it took 1 hour and then suddendly an error "unable to transcode MP3, can not read from avi file" eh? I'm trying to transcode from VOB to MPEG not AVI to MPEG.

so,,,,unless there's a sure way to edit/splice a VOB file into chapters using my Ubuntu 12.04 system, I'll have to just take it that it's only possible to do that, at professional video studios that cost 1000s of dollars.

Try to extracto only audio streams from vob file with ffmpeg:
and check the resulting mp3 file.
If it extracts all audio from video you can then convert vob in mpeg WITHOUT audio:
the sameq option keep the quality of the input file.
then you can mux them together.

From what I know of vob and mpeg, they are the same thing. This means you can use dd or split to split them into pieces.

Probably, mplayer will be more useful because you need to split at certain times rather than sizes.