Shortening of videos encoding from .vob to .wmv

I am attempting to take a .vob file, which was copied to my hard drive from a DVD, and encode it to a .wmv file. The .vob file plays fine in Windows Media Player for approximately 30 minutes. I installed Windows Media Encoder x64 Edition, but when I attempt to encode the file to a .wmv, it shortens the video from 30 minutes to 58 seconds (at most). It does not show the first 58 seconds, but instead shows the first 55 seconds of the video and then brief (less than 1 second) clips of the remaining video.

My ultimate goal is to use Windows Movie Maker to edit this film and add sound to it.

Any help would be greatly appreciated.

 

Ah, the wonders of working with .wmv, Vista, and Windows Movie Maker. Fun, fun, fun. Funfunfun stuff. So fun I never do it anymore, it was so fun.

Anyway. A few thoughts:

1.) Does your video have a total length of 30 minutes? Or is it that just that .vob is 30 minutes?

2.) You might want to consider using Avisynth to frameserve the .vob file to Movie Maker. What Avisynth can do is "trick" programs like Movie Maker, Media Player, VLC, etc. into thinking that the video is an .avi when it's not.

3.) That said, an even easier thing to do would be to simply change the extension of your .vob to .mpg, as that's basically what a .vob file is.

4.) If you can, try to steer clear of .wmv (and Movie Maker, for that matter, but that's something else entirely) and try to stick as close to .mpg/.mpeg/.vob and .avi as possible, since those two are the most common video formats nowadays. (Both are starting to be slowly replaced by AVCHD, though, but that won't happen for a long time.)

Anyway, try the renaming thing. If that doesn't work, I'll lead you through Avisynth. If THAT doesn't work, then I'll try to lead you through... well, converting to .wmv.

Good luck.

 

Thank you for the response. I was able to use Womble to edit the movie and then save it to the correct and usable format. With that said, I moved onto problem #579, trying to import music.

What is your experience with importing music from iTunes (which have an .m4a extension) into Movie Maker or possible Womble? So far, I've tried to encode these for simply import them, but it has not worked. I eventually resorted to playing the songs through iTunes, while simultaneously recording the song. As you can probably imagine, the sound quality came out less then satisfactory.

Thanks for you help

 

diver, just to let you know, converting it to .wmv from .vob takes away some of the quality (it might not be visible, but it's still a loss), and too much of that will completely deteriorate the video. If the conversion went okay, though, then cool.

As far as iTunes goes, I'm sure there's some sort of protection on the files you download (copy protection an' all that stuff), which means that you won't be able to just plop 'em into Movie Maker.

You can probably try using a program called Audacity to record your audio. It can record directly from your sound card, which means you'll get an almost 1:1 copy of your music. You can then save it to an unprotected .mp3 file. Try that out and see what you get.