Ripped VOB ..., now what for minidvd

[Phred_Phlinstone]

I would like to take a single chapter from a professional dvd and burn it on to a CDR (if I am correct I should be able to make upwards of 15 minutes of dvd quality onto a CDR). I have ripped the chapter using smartripper (following Sefy's guide for newbies - greate guide by the way) however, since I want to create a minidvd, do I have to reencode the vob into a DVD compliant mpeg2 format??? or can I use some program to write the dvd directly onto the cdr? My problem is I will be losing quality if I go through a reencode unneccessarily (right? or am off on this ). Can someone tell me how to maintain the high quality of the original dvd onto a minidvd? I have searched through this site but I have been unable to find this information (everything seems to say reencode). Thanks for any help and please forgive my ignorance.

[mijman]

Well, doom9.org has a program called VOBerator that will demultiplex the vob into its components, including the .ac3 and m2v files (you can decode the ac3 with DVD2AVI like normal) I like this program, but it immediately crashes on my system It might work for you, though. You wouldn't have to re-encode then. You can use smartripper to rip just the m2v also, but it's sometimes hard to sync up the audio.

The reason they say to re-encode is this: When the video and audio are in the vob, they are synced up with each other. When you seperate them, the video feed CAN (not always) play faster, or varies in speed so the audio file gets lost. (This was very evident in Phantom Menace.) By re-encoding, you make sure the video plays where it should.

As for making a miniDVD, after all this, it still needs to be authored with spruceup or myDVD or something like that. Just burning a MPG2 to a disc does not a miniDVD make (I think so, anyway. I could be wrong.)