DVD-to-AVI using VirtualDubMod

[billcoffin]

I've been trying to extract AVI from .VOBs on a DVD. (No real ripping; I had a service read my old VHS cassette onto a DVD so I could re-edit it.)

I've tried GK but it wants to copy the whole DVD. I'd rather work incrementally, which VirtualDubMod supports nicely.

I'm getting good audio quality (I had to download an AC3 decompressor) but the video quality is poor. It's "jittery". I'm using no compression, and staying with the default settings. I've also tried using various codecs (DivX, huffyuv, and others) but the results seem to crash my box (OK, sorry, I use WinME) when played in Windows Media Player or when I try to edit.

I'm hoping that I can get this right just by choosing the right codec and properly configuring it. I've had trouble getting other tools to work at all, so I'd like to stay with the VirtualDub family of tools. Any suggestions?

[SaSi]

There are two VirtualDUB mods that support MPEG reading. One is VirtualDUBMod and the other is VirtualDUB-MPEG. The first needs external codecs (like the AC3 you downloaded) and the second has everything built-in.

The second one is more stable and reliable in results (and slightly more official and more often updated), so I would recommend this one.

Now to your real problem.

Huffyuv is a fine lossless codec you can use, however lossless means just huffman entropy coding, i.e. huge files. 2Gb is the largest your Me FAT32 disks can handle.

DivX can be configured to produce a descent quality file at far smaller files, perhaps just below the file size barrier. Select constant quality encoding and a quality factor between 1.5 and 2. If you convert parts of the content at a time, you could be alright with this.

[johns0]

Fat32 has 4gb limitation.

[billcoffin]

Thanks for the responses. You guys are great! I've determined that I'm getting good AVI quality out of the VOB, but that my editor, ScreenBlast, doesn't seem to like the AVI format. ScreenBlast likes to work with DV format; which includes having the lower field first. SB will tolerate other formats (although it works a lot more slowly) but renders poor mpg from it. (Other than this, I like SB and want to keep using it.)

I've tried just about every codec I can find to see if one of them will produce AVI DV but none of them seem to have this capability. I've tried some DV-specific codecs (like Panasonic) but get error messages from VirtualDubMod and VirtualDub-mpeg2. (I've also looked into tricks like capturing from my computer back to the camcorder, but the camcorder refuses the format of my AVIs.)

Any suggestions?