Hardware requirements for VOB2MPG?

[aardvark_65]

I have had problems running VOB2MPG, and they largely seem to be of the PC locked up/running very slowly variety. This has happened with both version 3.0, and version 2.5 (2.3 has other problems). Are there any minimum/recommended hardware specifications to run VOB2MPG? I have a 5-6 year old Dell laptop, 1.7GHz processor, 1GB RAM, 100GB internal hard disk with about 5.5GB free (but I use a 500GB external hard disk with about 90GB free for working with DVD files), running XP Pro SP3. I have no problems running other DVD software, e.g. DVDfab HD decrypter 5.2.5.0, DVD shrink 3.2, DVD decrypter 3.5.

With version 3 in VOBSET mode, it seems to just hang – after about 5 minutes, the percentage progress on the bottom line was still 0%. I tried to abort it, but it still just hung, and I had to kill it by clicking on the x in the top RH corner of the screen. The log file showed the initial ffmpeg output, e.g. details of input and output files. The last line in the log file was “Press [q] to stop encoding”.

With version 3 in IFO mode, it does start to run. However it’s very slow, using a VOB input file of about 900MB which has a playing time of about 25 minutes. It took 11 minutes to “extract chapters”, and then it started “fixing timestamp discontinuities”, which took 1 hour, i.e. the whole process took about 1 hour 10 mins. And the PC pretty much stopped responding while it was running – I had a Word document open in which I was recording progress details etc, and just to swap screens (i.e. alt-tab) took up to a minute, as it very slowly redrew the screen. I ended VOB2MPG, but the PC was still painfully slow to respond, and in the end I had to hold down the power switch to kill it and reboot – it was taking far too long to try and close the individual windows. Even trying to bring up “turn off computer” in the start menu wouldn’t respond. This run had produced a MPG file, which I could open in Windows Media Player, but the playback was jerky and sometimes stopped, and the sound was uneven. To make sure that it wasn’t problems with the PC I then played the original VOB file in Windows Media Player, and it was O.K. The log file didn’t appear to contain any error messages.

With version 2.5, after specifying input and output files and pressing “start”, the hour glass came on and stayed on, with no apparent progress, and there was no hard disk activity. After several minutes of nothing happening, I eventually tried to abort it. But as with version 3 VOBSET mode, I had to click on the x in the top RH corner of the screen. There was a zero length mpg file in the output directory. But even after killing the VOB2MPG window, Windows Task manager showed VOB2MPG was still running and using > 95% of the CPU. I had to kill it in Task Manager under the “processes” tab. The last line in the log for this run does show “error, non monotone timestamps 318320 >= 33033” – but the timestamp for the error is only a few seconds after the run was started.

I came across FixVTS, installed it and ran it on the input VOB file, and then used this amended VOB file with version 2.5. However it made no difference.

With version 2.3, I had the opposite problem – it finished processing after about 2 seconds. There was an output file of zero length. In the log file there were 2 messages “[dvd @ 0069DF34]sample rate not set” and “Could not write header for output file #0 (incorrect codec parameters ?)”. I also tried it using the VOB file created with FixVTS, with the same result.

Sorry this is turning into a novel, but I’d better explain what I’m trying to do. I have 2 DVDs with several episodes of a TV show on each, and I want to take one episode from each input DVD and write them to one output DVD. I ripped the 2 DVDs to my hard disk with DVD Fab HD decrypter (since the DVDs are region 1, which will play in my region free DVD player but not on my laptop, which is set for region 4 (I am in Australia), and DVD shrink can’t process a DVD with a different region code). I then used DVD shrink in reauthor mode to select the first episode of each DVD, and tried to generate the files for a new DVD with DVD styler, a DVD authoring program. However the DVD styler run failed, and a DVD styler forum page for the error suggested using VOB2MPG to convert the input VOB files into MPG, and using the resultant MPG files in DVD styler to author the DVD.

If anyone has any alternative suggestions of how to achieve this, using freeware, I would be interested.

[ChrissyBoy]

VOB2MPG relies, in the main, on fast disk I/O. Using an external drive is going to be a bottleneck here. Laptops normally have slow internal hard drives and coupled with a 1.7GHz CPU - i am not suprised at your results. Perhaps renaming your VOBs to .mpg will suffice for DVD Styler?

[aardvark_65]

I tried renaming the VOB files to MPG, but unfortunately it didn't work. I got the same error in DVD Styler ("ERR: SCR moves backwards, remultiplex input.").

When I played the (renamed from VOB) MPG file in Windows Media Player, the video and audio were significantly out of sync (the audio was “behind” the video by at least several seconds), and occasionally the video freezes. The original VOB file plays O.K. in Media Player.

[Joey9]

I got 4 GB RAM on my machine and when I run VOB2MPG I have to stop any other app I'm running cause it sucks up all my memory up to 98%. If I was to try and run anything including IE, my machine freezes up. Can't touch it.

Maybe the developer ChrissyBoy should consider implementing an option so VOB2MPG could use the graphics card, like TMPGEnc Xpress does. That would definitely solve the problem.