Capturing a VOB?

[kshavo]

I was unable recently to copy a small VOB file into a DVD project I was making. So I played the dvd through my VCR then it went to my digital cam and to the computer.
My question is - is there quality loss when you do this. Does reencoding occur? Visually it looked fine to me - although the video was a bit rough in the first place.

Any help would be great

[Capmaster]

It sounds like you have a firewire port on your PC but no capture card. Apparently you're using the "pass-through" feature of your cam. No problem there. It's done all the time.

What your camcorder is doing to the signal is converting it from analog to digital. It's not reencoding, since it was never coded to begin with.

Reencoding would occur when you take the DV file you just received on the PC from your camcorder and converted it to MPEG2 prior to authoring. You will need to do this if you want to make a DVD, but just the act of transferring it to your PC doesn't reencode it at all.

The camcorder has a fast analog-to-DV circuit built in. The pass-through accesses this circuit and makes it available to external devices that generate an analog output. It then converts it to mildly compressed "DV", or "Digital Video" which usually takes the form of an AVI file. The firewire transfer to your PC is merely a file copy. Instead of storing it in your camera, it sends the digital data along to your PC for further processing as needed.

[kshavo]

Hey thanks.
This is what I suspected, although you articulated it much better than I could.

Thanks again

[rhegedus]

Or, load the VOB into VirtualDub and convert to DV using the Panasonic DV codec.