Have VOB file, now what?!

[fudgebrown]

I used Mac the Ripper to extract certain chapters from a DVD. Now i have the VOB file/s and I simply want to get them as clips into iMovie to create my own menu etc. Of course iMovie won't let me import the VOB files, so what do i do? I read about Mencoder but that program is not helping me for some reason. Anyone have a good solution? Perhaps VOB to AVI and then import into iMovie? What program is best for this...

[galactica]

get them into a quicktime compatible container [.mov, .mp4 etc]

[fudgebrown]

ok thanks -- so how do i get them in the quicktime container? what program will do this?

[thoughton]

Cinematize is probably the easiest way, but it's not free. It is very fast though, a few minutes per chapter and you end up with a few-hundred-MB mov file. Quality is essentially perfect apart froma slight dithering which you cant notice on a TV anyway.

BTW, I seem to recall iMovie will choke on widescreen input (well, it'll accept it, but it will be squashed horizontally).

[TugBoat]

ok thanks -- so how do i get them in the quicktime container? what program will do this?

Well, the easiest FREE way, IMHO, would be to use YadeX to rip the selected scenes into streams. The part that I'm not sure about is if the bare bones iMovie 4 will import the m2v stream from YadeX. Mine does. But, I have the QT MPEG2 Viewer ($20) and DVDSP2 ($$$) installed. I never use iMovie BTW. If it doesn't, you can use DIVA to convert the m2v to DV so iMovie likes it.

Then use mAC3dec to convert the AC3 into a wav and import that also. Then you'll have your video and audio track in iMovie, complete with the video aspect change to 4:3

I guess you could make a 720x480 black picture, 'add scaled' to the video in QT Pro (MPEG2 Viewer installed), adjust the layers and aspect, save, then try that in iMovie. Seems like a lot of work

[pixel zombie]

i used to use toast 6 to simple burn them toa dvd but this doesn't seem to work with toast 6.04, not sure why......i've used sizzle to make menus but i can never seem to get that app to work right...