We often need to rip DVDs for events in order to make simple edits, or play the video files from a computer. Handbrake and VLC are both free and available for Mac OS X, and both do a decent job, but I find a lot of the settings are easy to get wrong (especially bitrate, interlacing parameters, etc), which can lead to a poor quality result.
A surprisingly straightforward alternative is to use a professional package which doesn’t support ripping “VOB” files (the MPEG2 video files stored on a video DVD) out of the box.
If your DVD is unencrypted (as with most “show” DVDs), you can just open the disc in Finder, copy the “Video_TS” folder to the desktop, and rename the contained .VOB files, to a .MPG extension. Finder will prompt you to confirm that you’re changing the extension of the file – click OK.
You will now find that you can import the MPEG2 files from the VIDEO_TS folder straight into Adobe Media Encoder, and use the various high-quality encoding options available to normal video files.
This should also work with Compressor, although I haven’t had a chance to try it.
Adobe Media Encoder comes included with Premiere Pro CS4 and CS5, and most of the Adobe production packages/suites.
#1 by Josh Street on July 28, 2011 - 11:57 am
I’ve found that Adobe Media Encoder is very sensitive to file extensions – Compressor is clunky but will tend to figure out whatever you throw at it, but as you say it’s critical to get the extension right for AME to even allow you to open a file. This feels okay on Windows, but is pretty frustrating on OS X where apps are just expected to deal with it!