VOB merging: what command-line tool is recommended (Linux)?

I'd like to merge the VOB's of a DVD into a single VOB file.

What command-line tool is recommended under Linux?

jldupont

Posted 2009-09-30T21:18:38.017

Reputation: 5 524

Answers

Assuming you only care about the vobs and not anything else on the dvd, you can simply cat them together:

cat *.vob > big.vob

will work just fine.

DaveParillo

Posted 2009-09-30T21:18:38.017

Reputation: 13 402

2Didn't know this worked, wow. If you're impatient and want to see progress, you could use:

cat *.VOB | pv | dd of=big.vob – SickAnimations – 2013-11-24T13:59:01.100

The problem with simply concatenating VOB files is that the resulting VOB does not display the correct playback time or location in most media players as described here and here:

Typical problems are: timing issues, not being able to show the progress properly, no way to skip forward, crashes, missing audio, audio off sync, only showing the first 5 seconds of the video etc.

However, you can losslessly copy and merge the VOBs into a single MPG (since VOBs contain MPGs) which won't have the playback issues via ffmpeg; e.g.,

ffmpeg -i 'concat:VTS_01_1.VOB|VTS_01_2.VOB|VTS_01_3.VOB|VTS_01_4.VOB|VTS_01_5.VOB|VTS_01_6.VOB|VTS_01_7.VOB' -acodec copy -vcodec copy combined.mpg

Miles Wolbe

Posted 2009-09-30T21:18:38.017

Reputation: 508

How about that :

pv *.vob > big.vob

SebMa

Posted 2009-09-30T21:18:38.017

Reputation: 599

If you read the first sentence of the pv man page, you are right, pv is usually used between pipes. But if you read the 3rd and 4th, it says it can also be used like "cat" :

"pv will copy each supplied FILE in turn to standard output (- means standard input), or if no FILEs are specified just standard input is copied. This is the same behaviour as cat(1)."

Try and you will see it works :-) – SebMa – 2016-04-09T21:06:03.733

I agree, but the other usage (like "cat") also works. Please, try it. – SebMa – 2016-04-09T21:10:17.687

I do and here is result :

`pv *.aac > toto

94,2MiB 0:00:00 [ 530MiB/s] [======================================>] 100%` – SebMa – 2016-04-09T21:16:22.843