This is my first post at afterdawn. (Have just discovered the site...what a terrific resource it is.) Here's the situation. Am sure it's simple, but so am I (minded), and I'm tired and frustrated and need someone to guide me through this part of the forest. Daughter sent me a DVD of home movies. One in particular was important. I opened the DVD with Windows Explorer, copied the 450MB file to my hard drive. The file had a .VOB extension, and played perfectly with PowerDVD. When I copied the file and changed the extension to .MPG, it then also played perfectly with Windows Media Player. I opened Ulead VideoStudio 7 in order to cut out the first couple minutes. (I'm not too experienced with VS7, using it only when I transfer VHS tapes to DVD, doing no editing in the process.) With the unwanted minutes cut, I then tried saving the leftover video. One of the options was NTSC-DVD, and that seemed right. I gave the new video a different file name, then went away for about 30 minutes while VS7 rendered (?) it. Coming back to the computer, Windows Explorer shows my new file is twice the size of the original. Odd, I'm thinking, but no problem, it's still much less than the capacity of a DVD. I think I'm good to go. But before burning the new file to a DVD, I try playing it back. Bummer: no audio, whether using Win Media Player or PowerDVD. I've repeated this exercise about three times this afternoon, and always with the same result: video good, audio missing. What am I doing wrong? Thanks for all your efforts to help. -- Steve
>> When I copied the file and changed the extension to .MPG, Why would you do that? Won't Ulead VS7 accept VOB's? The extensions are not completely interchangeable. As far as size, on my DVD player a 450MB DVD won't play. That's why Nero has an option to burn a minimum of 1GB. I assume the resultant larger file was Ulead's way of achieving this player compatabilty. What you want to accomplish could easily be done with NeroVision Express, which readily accepts .VOB files. You could trim, add chapters and set the bitrate to a higher number until at least a gig is written, or use the High Quality setting from the drop down.
MysticE -- Appreciate your advice, but NeroExpress doesn't look like the right tool for this job. It doesn't let me trip that unwanted first minute, and seems to want to use MPEG-1 only. MPEG-2 is better quality, no? I'm still stumped by why in the file VS7 produces, the video works but not the audio. Any other ideas?
Well I use NeroVision3. The beauty of of is that it can accept almost any vid file, asf, avi (Divx and Xvid), mpeg1/2, mp4, VOB, wmv, mod, PAL and NTSC in one project if need be. And if your files are DVD ready, such as VOB, you can tick 'Smart Encoding' to not re-encode the file. I'm a bit confused by this statement, you can easily trim video, quite precisely actually. I also don't understand "seems to want to use MPEG-1 only.", you mean as input files? >> I'm still stumped by why in the file VS7 produces, the video works but not the audio. I assume it has to do with the VOB file you are using, and renaming to mpg. They are not the same. As I asked can you not import the VOB directly (without renaming) into VS7? I imagine if you converted the VOB to mpeg it might work, or demux the vob into separate video and audio streams. You can use TMPGEnc to demux the VOBs. The feature is found in the "File, Mpeg Tools, Simple Demultiplex" menu. It will split the file into audio and video. A programs like this would actually convert the VOB to an mpeg2 file. http://www.erightsoft.com/SUPER.html
MysticE -- Again, appreciate your efforts to help. But I fly back to Iraq tomorrow. Too much to do tonight. Will pick this conundrum up again when I return next year. -- Steve
