Digitalized VHS no chapters/navigation

[Narktor]

Hey,

Some time ago I had 2 VHS records from my childhood transformed into digital.
Its VOB Files.

Its all there, but there seems to be no structure or at least my player (recent VLC and MPC-HC) doesnt recognize it.

Its a bit of a nuisance since its hours of records without any chance of navigating. Not just chapters are missing, the progress bar is pretty much dysfunctional. It does merely display the current runtime, but if you click it just throws you back to some point in the video, I guess the part where the supposed chapter is meant to start.

Can anybody give some advide what I can do about it?

[lordsmurf]

VOB are not video files, but Video OBject files. You must extract, rip, to the actual MPEG files.

[Alwyn]

Options options options!

First off, if they are on a physical DVD and you don't have a backup, stick it in your computer and copy the folders on the DVD over to your hard drive. You never know when your only copy will go Kaput.

Tell us what these files/folders look like. Are they in a "VIDEO_TS" folder? Pop in your DVD, double click on the drive on the left in File Explorer, then double-click on the VIDEO_TS folder if it exists. Take a screenshot and add it to your post with the "Upload Image button. That will show us the contents of your DVD.

How do you want to view the videos? Using the DVD menus, or just the straight video files.

General comments:
-VLC will play a DVD using it's menus. Put the DVD into your PC drive, then in File Explorer, when the DVD details appear in the drive list, right-click and choose Play with VLC Player. The main menu screen should appear. Then you can click on the movies/chapters to play.

-These days, a lot of people simply play the files on their PC or Network. I split up my videos so each file covers a particular subject, much like the chapters of a DVD. Simply "ripping to the MPEG files" will simply give you a whopper video file, up to 2 hours-long, which is impractical. You don't want to be continually scrolling through a 2 hour video to continue on from the last viewing.

AVIDemux will, firstly, join up the VOBs of each movie of the DVD (you can have multiple movies, or VOB sets, on a DVD). But then you can save sections of the MPEGs into individual files so you can watch each separately. Say you had a DVD of your childhood: you could have the first file showing the holiday in Spain, then the next file showing you first day at school, and third file of your football antics. The beauty of AVIDemux for this is it won't recode your videos when you make your sections/files; they will stay in the MPEG 2 format, which all players these days will play.

[Narktor]

Options options options!
Tell us what these files/folders look like. Are they in a "VIDEO_TS" folder? Pop in your DVD, double click on the drive on the left in File Explorer, then double-click on the VIDEO_TS folder if it exists. Take a screenshot and add it to your post with the "Upload Image button. That will show us the contents of your DVD.

Its on hard drive, the folder looks like this.
1 PDF with a scan of the handwritten table of contents and the two VOBs.


[Attachment 83987 - Click to enlarge]

Well, I would like to navigate both by progress bar and chapters.
The first VOB contains almost 3 hours of moviecontent, as I can see now in AVIDEMUX


EDIT:

I just saved the videos to MKV via AVIDEMUX.
This alone is a BIG help!
Now the progress bar works! This makes the movies at least somehow navigable!

EDIT 2:
For some strange reason, the new file created from the first video has no sound issues at all, while the second one wont play any sound at all if I navigate forward via progressbar.

[Alwyn]

Great!

I don't know what is causing you to lose audio after navigating forward. You could try saving that second video as Output Format "MPEG-PS Muxer". That might be less confusing for your player.

Re chapters, I believe you can set up chapters in the MKV file, but how it's done I have no idea. I believe MKVToolnix is involved. As I mentioned, I just have individual files for each event, with descriptive filenames telling me what the file are about.

I've got a detailed page on the use of AVIDemux here. It explains VOB joining and making lossless snippets, which you could do to create your individual files (if you go down that path).

When joining up the VOBs, remember they are in groups eg VTS_01_1, VTS_01_2 and VTS_01_3 are the three VOBs for movie No 1 on the disk, and VTS_02_1, VTS_02_2 and VTS_02_3 are the VOBs for movie No 2.

When opening with AVIDemux, choose the "_1" VOB of the movie you want to join up and AVIDemux will automatically load, in sequence, the rest of the VOBs for that movie.