problem when attempting to use mkvmerge

[xunil76]

i own the Lord of the Rings extended version DVD's, and i want to make a single, movie-only backup (no subtitles, alternate languages, extras, etc.) for each of the 3 movies that i can place on my home media server once i get it built. i want to combine the two parts of each movie into 1, for a total of 3 video files (in mkv container), rather than having 6 separate files (2 for each movie)....and i want the playback to be seamless. i would also like to keep the chapters intact as well, but that's not super-important.

i have ripped each of the 6 movie discs to my hard drive using DVDFab, then used DVDShrink to "re-author" the movie (with no compression), keeping only the main movie with only the DTS soundtrack. i output those files using the "Hard Disk Folder" option, rather than .iso, which gives me the following files:

Disc 1 folder..............Disc 2 folder

VIDEO_TS.BUP..........VIDEO_TS.BUP
VIDEO_TS.IFO..........VIDEO_TS.IFO
VTS_01_0.BUP..........VTS_01_0.BUP
VTS_01_0.IFO..........VTS_01_0.IFO
VTS_01_1.VOB..........VTS_01_1.VOB
VTS_01_2.VOB..........VTS_01_2.VOB
VTS_01_3.VOB..........VTS_01_3.VOB
VTS_01_4.VOB..........VTS_01_4.VOB
VTS_01_5.VOB..........VTS_01_5.VOB
VTS_01_6.VOB..........VTS_01_6.VOB

i don't want to re-encode these files into any other format for several reasons, the major reason being the time it takes to re-encode them......so i'm attempting to use mkvmerge to simply copy the audio & video streams in their existing formats (MPEG-2/DTS) directly over into an mkv container, appending each consecutive VOB file to the one before it, in the correct order (obviously), to create a single, large mkv file containing the entire movie. file size is not important, i will be storing these files on a multi-teryabyte RAID-5 or RAID-6 array.....picture/audio quality is paramount here.

the problem i run into is shown in the screenshot i've attached to this post (namely, 3 of the VOB files seem to be in AVC/h.264 video format vs. MPEG-2.....and when i attempt to mux them together, it tells me i can't, because some of the files have different formats and can't be appended together...... )

why would there be 2 different video formats on the same movie stream? and how do i go about getting around this major f'ing annoyance? is it possible that i'm gonna need to use something more advanced than DVDShrink to rip out the "movie-only" files so that they're all MPEG-2-encoded, and if so, what's the best/easiest tool for doing so?

mkvmerge.jpg

[xunil76]

gah, and now i've realized i have another problem.....when muxing each individual file, it works, creating an mkv file, but the audio is out of synch with the video......

why is nothing ever easy?....

[xunil76]

well, after tooling around with mkvmerge for a while and reading a BUNCH of other stuff about video encoding, etc., i finally got this to work.

i had to rip the movie into one large VOB file (no splitting), and that took care of the different video codecs showing up in mkvmerge when adding/appending the files together.

as for the audio being out of synch, i found the "Delay (in ms)" option by blind luck, and was able to correct the offset.

so i now have a working copy of the first two movies, and i'll have the 3rd when i get home from work in a couple hours.

although the files are still pretty large, there's zero loss of quality in either the audio or video, and the playback across the "join" point of the two movies is seamless! exactly what i was looking for!

[guns1inger]

You could have exactly the same thing with VOB2MPG, and ended up with a single mpg file ready to play. Again, zero loss, and without the hassle of the mkv container (which in this case is completely unnecessary)

[xunil76]

thanks for the heads-up, i'll take a look at that...but one question:

does the mpg format support chapters? if so, i don't recall ever coming across an mpg file that has chapters enabled.

[xunil76]

oh, and also, does mpg support DTS audio?