Hello all. When I use MPlayer, I can play vob files effortlessly (when copied to hard disk), but when I try to play them using Windows Media Player, it causes massive disk activity and skips to the end almost immediately. This only happens with certain VOB files. Is this due to a copyright protection mechanism in the file?

If you just copied the VOB's from the DVD, they will still be encrypted (for most DVD's). Perhaps that's why WMV chokes on them...

There's a nice program that reads VOBs from a DVD and decrypts them right away. It's called tccat and is part of the "transcode" program suite. Maybe with that it works better, and anyway you'll end up with unencrypted vobs If your file system can handle files over 2GB you can even make one huge file out of it

there's also vobcopy among other utilities to copy and decrypt vob files. but playing vobs generally is bad. reencode them to an avi or mpeg. even if it's without recoding the data, you can still copy the real mpeg2 stream and sleected audio to a much more sane avi file.

OK. I got things to work. Here's what I did:

1. tcextract -i <vob file> -x mpeg2 > a.out to extract the video stream.

2. tcextract -i <vob file> -x ac3 > b.out to extract the audio stream.

3. tcmplex -i a.out -p b.out -o output.mpg -m 2 to recreate the file

Hopefully all those operations didn't in any way affect the quality of the media.
Thanks to all.

No problem...

However, I think you will lose the subtitles this way
But that's probably not really a problem since you are a native English speaker.

Maybe WMV just wasn't happy with a non-mpeg/avi file format... Who knows??

Anyway have fun with it. If you ever wanna convert dvds to divx or something, be sure to check out mencoder, its supplied with mplayer, it converts a movie in less than 3 hours on my 1600MHz P4 ! I once used transcode to do it but it was much slower (that was 2 years ago -- it may have inproved since then...)

cheers
nukkel

be sure to check out my very own acidrip... http://acidrip.sf.net which uses mencoder.

looks nice