VOB File Conversion for Mac

[Simon Bonner]

Hi Max,

There’s probably a ‘proper’ way to do this, but I would just change the file extensions from VOB to MPG.

Simon Bonner

youtube.com/simonsaysfx

[David Johnson]

As Simon says (no pun intended), you can just change the extensions to MPG … if I recall correctly, FCP won’t read the muxed audio so you might first have to open the MPGs with QuickTime and export the audio as AIFs, then import those into FCP to put back with the MPG video.

[Michael Szalapski]

Also, just as an aside, AE is a terrible program for dealing with this issue. The reason? VOB’s are encoded with MPEG-2. Why is that a problem? I refer you to Dave LaRonde:

Dave’s Stock Answer #1:

If the footage you imported into AE is any kind of the following —
footage in an HDV acquisition codec, MPEG1, MPEG2, mp4, m2t, H.261 or
H.264 — you need to convert it to a different codec.

These kinds of footage use temporal, or interframe compression. They
have keyframes at regular intervals, containing complete frame
information. However, the frames in between do NOT have complete
information. Interframe codecs toss out duplicated information.

In order to maintain peak rendering efficiency, AE needs complete
information for each and every frame. But because these kinds of footage
contain only partial information, AE freaks out, resulting in a wide
variety of problems.

– The Great Szalam
(The ‘Great’ stands for ‘Not So Great, in fact, Extremely Humble’)

No trees were harmed in the creation of this message, but several thousand electrons were mildly inconvenienced.

[Walter Soyka]

AE is not the tool for this.

Try MPEG Streamclip; it’s a great tool, and it’s free. You can use it to transcode VOB to whatever format (DV, ProRes, etc.) that you’re editing with in FCP.

It relies on the Apple Quicktime MPEG-2 playback component; I believe this is now part of the standard Final Cut Studio install, but it’s also available separately here.

Walter Soyka
Principal & Designer at Keen Live
Motion Graphics, Widescreen Events, Presentation Design, and Consulting
RenderBreak Blog – What I’m thinking when my workstation’s thinking
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[Chris King]

VOB is the format used in DVD and will not open in Apple’s video player, video editing software easily. I want to edit and play some VOB files on Mac, but the video player QuickTime, and editing programs like FCP can’t support the VOB format.

What I can do is to convert VOB to MOV, a Mac fully compatible format. To convert DVD VOB videos for playing, editing on Mac, it’s undoubtedly that a video conversion program is needed. You can just get freeware like Handbrake to make it. If you are not satisfied with the output quality, you can try some 3rd party VOB converter for Mac without any losing quality.