OSEx, VideoLAN sound quality

[trojanf]

hello
i am using mac os X 10.2.1
i have been using OSEx to encode from DVD video to .VOB files, and playing them with VideoLAN.
on some films, the sound quality is really mashed when i play them from the .VOB file, really "aliased" for those that know the term. i don't know if this is due to the encoding or playback. does anyone know which it is likely to be?
i tried ripping in OS 9 with a different prog but the same thing happened.

i have thought of buying apple's MPEG2 component and trying to play the .VOBs on quicktime.
can anyone report on the sound quality in quicktime verses VideoLAN?

thanks in advance for any help

[Macnewbie]

If the VOBs you are extracting use AC-3 audio then the MPEG-2 playback component won't help you. It can't decode AC-3 audio. The playback component FAQ is here: http://www.apple.com/quicktime/products/mpeg2playback/faq.html

I have heard many other people complain about the sound quality with VLC. One thing you could try to test the OSEx extraction process is to extract the dvd with OSEx using the "DVD Folders" option. Then launch the Apple DVD player and choose the "Open VIDEO_TS folder" option to play the extracted movie. If it sounds ok with the DVD player software then the problem is VLC.

[trojanf]

thanks macnewbie, i tried your suggestion... i guess it's down to VLC playing digital audio without an anti-aliasing filter.

there is no other program that plays VOBs, is there? is it feasable to encode the audio to aiff (i managed this) and the video to another easily viewable format, like MPEG4 (i never tried) then combine them somehow? how much would the picture degrade if i did this? i heard that MPEG4 allows much smaller file sizes.

i've been thinking of getting virtual pc to do all this stuff because there seems to be an abundance of pc software for these kind of things!

[Macnewbie]

The MPEG-2 playback component will play the VOB files, there just won't be any sound. You don't want to demux the vob and then convert the audio. This always almost leads to the video and audio getting out of sync. There are some other players you can try. Goto this page and look on the right hand side under the players section: http://www.squeeds.com/