AVS with VOB

[morganfj]

OK big problem while trying AVS converter..
I have an old movie on ISO... a Ma&Pa Kettle film 46 minutes long.
On ISO (7 VOB files most with 1G file sizes) I attempted to convert it to mp4 using AVS.
No matter how hard I tried the the smallest I could get AVS to convert to ended up with a 3.5Gig mp4 with this 46minute film.. and that was using the AVS bit rate calculator to the smallest allowable size!!! and even then the film is un-watchable!!!

At 640x480 (same as AVS) and 700 Bitrated at 24FPS and I would expect a size around 300mb...

Attempting this with Freemake resulted in Freemake shutting down while loading VOB (Too Large???) And of course Handbrake does not offer VOB (or multiple?).

Thanks for any suggestions.. FJM

[hello_hello]

Handbrake should open and encode multiple vob files as long as they're part of a single title or a single set. I don't use it but I'd be astounded if it didn't given that's what most DVDs look like.

Any Avisynth based encoder (ie MeGUI) should be able to handle multiple vob files from a single set as they all open and index with DGIndex and it treats sequentially numbered vob files as a single vob file.

I never try to directly encode ISO files so I can't make any suggestions there, but are you extracting to vob files first?

You could open the ISO with DVDShrink, set the output target size to DVD9 or larger in it's preferences so it won't try to shrink, uncheck the option for splitting vob files into 1GB chunks, select Re-author mode, drag the movie title from the right pane to the left, and when you use the backup function you'll be saving the movie as a single large vob file.

I don't use AVS converter or Freemake so I can't help there, but those old movies tend to be noisy and very hard to compress because they're so noisy, so low bitrates probably won't look all that good. I re-encoded some Laurel and Hardy movies a while back and at 704x528 (they were PAL), after applying noise filtering they were still coming in at something like 2500kbps or more for the quality setting I normally use with the x264 encoder (CRF18).

Maybe if you're having problems with some particular ISOs/VOBs it's not because multiple programs have issues with those file types but because there's something not right/standard about the files themselves.

[morganfj]

Thanks so mush.. will try this...