Mac Conversion from DVD to .Mov? Any suggestions?

[Jeff_NJ]

Hi,

I recently converted a friend's vhs wedding video to DVD using my standalone dvd recorder. I now want to rip that dvd to my iMac as a .mov where I can then import it into iDVD and create a menu.

I've tried DVD Ripper and it works, but the picture quality is terrible. I even set the bitrate as high as 8500. Does anyone have any suggestions on apps that might work and produce nice results?

Thanks in advance.

Jeff

[terryj]

Go get MpegStreamclip ( Free) and the QT Mpeg-2 ( $20) add on.
It will allow you to open the DVD's muxed VOB files,
and then allow you to export that to DV Stream, iMovie's native
format.

Once you have the DV Stream in iMovie, you can do what you want,
and then send that ( export) to iDVD.

[jman98]

Conversion from DVD to MOV is lossy. Conversion from MOV back to DVD is lossy again. Maybe you just need to find a way to work with MPEG-2 video and make a DVD menu on your iMac. Of course, we know nothing about your DVD recorder and the original VHS tape may have been crap, so recording a crap tape to a (possibly - who knows?) crap DVD recorder with a low bit rate will certainly lead to crap results.

[Jeff_NJ]

Thanks for the replies. Here is my situation in further detail. My friend gave me his wedding vhs video. Quality is pretty good. I have a sony DVD recorder. I converted the vhs to dvd. However, I'd like to add an actual menu. So now I need to get the video from the dvd, onto my iMac where I can build a menu, then import the video file. I need to do it this way, as I dont have a capture card. I normally capture video from my camcorder using firewire. Thanks for your help!

Jeff

[lordsmurf]

Re-Author it, you do not want to mess with MOV files. You can do it without re-encoding the video.

[tomlee59]

The Blue One sayeth much sooth. If all you want to do is simply add menus, there is no need to touch the video stream at all. As has been pointed out, that's unnecessarily time consuming and degrades quality quite a bit (since you would need to perform two lossy conversions). Just use a DVD authoring tool to build yourself a new DVD with the same video assets as the original DVD, but with menus added. It will be quick, and the video quality will be untouched.

[terryj]

for re-using the existing video streams (without conversion), and re-authoring a new Menu structure, DVD Studio Pro is the way to go,
or use Toast Titanium 8 / 9.
iDVD is still crippled in the fact it needs assets to not already be muxed.

[Jeff_NJ]

But how do I get the video files off of the dvd? I downloaded streamclip. Looks pretty good. So just open the video files and export as DV? Is that the route I should go?

I really appreciate the help!

Jeff

[Greyhouse]

If you search this forum for VRO you should find the help you need getting Toast to read and output in appropriate format.