Hi,

Someone provided me with a movie as a series of VOB files. Previously I have used mkisofs to create an ISO image and then used K3b to burn the image to DVD. Unfortunately, this series of VOB files creates a ISO image file too big (5.5 GB) to fit on a single DVD. How can I split these VOBs to create two ISO images.

The structure of the VOB files is :

16 -rw-rw-r-- 1 jerry jerry 12288 Apr 30 22:34 VIDEO_TS.BUP
16 -rw-rw-r-- 1 jerry jerry 12288 Apr 30 22:34 VIDEO_TS.IFO
28624 -rw-rw-r-- 1 jerry jerry 29274112 Apr 30 22:34 VIDEO_TS.VOB
52 -rw-rw-r-- 1 jerry jerry 49152 Apr 30 22:34 VTS_01_0.BUP
52 -rw-rw-r-- 1 jerry jerry 49152 Apr 30 22:34 VTS_01_0.IFO
30416 -rw-rw-r-- 1 jerry jerry 31105024 Apr 30 22:34 VTS_01_0.VOB
1049576 -rw-rw-r-- 1 jerry jerry 1073709056 Apr 30 22:37 VTS_01_1.VOB
1049576 -rw-rw-r-- 1 jerry jerry 1073709056 Apr 30 22:42 VTS_01_2.VOB
1049576 -rw-rw-r-- 1 jerry jerry 1073709056 Apr 30 22:44 VTS_01_3.VOB
1049576 -rw-rw-r-- 1 jerry jerry 1073709056 Apr 30 22:46 VTS_01_4.VOB
362792 -rw-rw-r-- 1 jerry jerry 371126272 Apr 30 22:47 VTS_01_5.VOB
40 -rw-rw-r-- 1 jerry jerry 34816 Apr 30 22:47 VTS_02_0.BUP
40 -rw-rw-r-- 1 jerry jerry 34816 Apr 30 22:47 VTS_02_0.IFO
32920 -rw-rw-r-- 1 jerry jerry 33665024 Apr 30 22:47 VTS_02_0.VOB
1049576 -rw-rw-r-- 1 jerry jerry 1073709056 Apr 30 22:49 VTS_02_1.VOB
255632 -rw-rw-r-- 1 jerry jerry 261498880 Apr 30 22:50 VTS_02_2.VOB

Any thoughts?

Before I start, let me be clear: I have not actually done this. I know it's possible, but you will have to figure out the exact steps yourself. I do something very similar when I'm backing up my own DVDs, but I only strip the video, because I don't really care about menus and such (in fact, I prefer not to have them). This is assuming that the files you mention are part of a produced DVD (e.g a movie), and not some home videos - if you're working with home videos, just extract the tracks (transcode is good for this too) and re-create them with dvdauthor.

1) Use dvdauthor to create an XML file describing the tracks/menus etc from the disc (or the directory, if these files are on your drive)
2) Use a stream tool to requantize the largest video file - effectively this lowers the quality of the video, but it's usually quite acceptable. I use transcode to do this.
3) alter the XML file to refer to your requantized video stream instead of the original, and then use dvdauthor again to build a DVD compatible structure
4) use mkisofs and your burner to create and burn the image.