0

My wife brought me a box of DVDs with her home movies from her life before me. I would like to store the contents permanently on our Linux home server alongside 100,000 jpg files and some more recent iPhone videos in HEVC/.mov format.

Since the DVDs are MPEG-2 format, it should be trivial to just move the files.

Preliminary look-around suggests that the DVD has an ISO-UDF file system (which Linux is happy to mount) with an empty AUDIO_TS folder and a VIDEO_TS folder containing a small number of VTS_XX_YY.VOB files, each smaller than 1GB. VLC is happy to play the .VOB files, so in the cases where the is only one VOB file, it seems that it would work to simply rename it to MyHomeMovie.mpeg and put it where my PLEX server can find it. But what about the general case where there are 2, 3 or 4 VOB files?

Can I just concatenate them into one file, or do I need to use a program to join them in a way that the header data up front gets updated to reflect the larger file, and the other header data blocks are omitted?

If so, can you point me to a program to do that?

Improve this question
3
  • 1
    Arguably the easiest way to do it is using a tool such as Handbrake.
    – ChanganAuto
    Commented Sep 22, 2022 at 20:50
  • 1
    Yes, after I asked the question, I looked at answers to some related qyuestions, and learned about HandBrake. It seems to be exactly what I need. I am trying it out right now on my Win-11 desktiop. The next challenge - which HandBrake may also be able to deal with - is the fact that the DVDs were stored badly, and half of them have many many many read errors.
    – Lars Poulsen
    Commented Sep 22, 2022 at 21:17
  • Yes, it may but it may also fail if it finds too many errors. That being the case then you can use some software to make ISO (or IMG) image files that allows many retries for reading bad sectors.
    – ChanganAuto
    Commented Sep 22, 2022 at 21:21

1 Answer 1

Reset to default
0

The best tools to convert DVDs to .mpg or .m4v files is undoubtedly HandBrake. In my case, half the discs failed to read the UFS directory, so I think those are a lost cause.

Improve this answer
1
  • Your answer could be improved with additional supporting information. Please edit to add further details, such as citations or documentation, so that others can confirm that your answer is correct. You can find more information on how to write good answers in the help center.
    – Community Bot
    Commented Oct 10, 2022 at 22:14

You must log in to answer this question.

Not the answer you're looking for? Browse other questions tagged .