Trouble with Ripped DVDs/converting .VOB to .AVI

[research]

Hi, I am new to this forum.

First of all, I am doing research at my university, and my first project was to rip about 40 dvds onto the hd and from there, upload onto a video host website. All the dvds are our own recordings.

So the process was 1) Dvd shrink, to rip disks
2) Convert files to .AVI using AVI.net
3) Use AVI splitter to split into smaller files to be upload onto video host site

So everything is fine so far, however I have a few questions...

1) After ripping a video to the hard drive, I have one VTS_01_1.vob and a VTS_01_2.vob. I figured that the VTS_01_2 was just the second half of the VTS_01_1, but it contains the same footage. Is this ok to be deleted? Is there a reason for this files existence?

2) Converting .VOB files using AVI.net takes about 1hr and 20 minutes for one .VOB with 45 minutes of footage. I have been lowering the quality (ex: orig=800MB, convert to 500=MB). Is there a faster way to do this?

Thank you so much! I am not a computer person and need all the help I can get!

[Ai Haibara]

If they're your own recordings (not a retail DVD-Video disc), you shouldn't really need to use DVD Shrink to rip the DVDs - just copy the files straight from the disc.

You might try running VOB2MPEG on the DVD files, which should create an MPEG from the files, without re-encoding. The MPEG might be a little easier for converters to take than having to parse the VOB files.