Merging VOB files

A couple of years ago I was faced with the challenge of transcoding a DVD into an optimized H.264 file for usage on the web. First of all I had to remove the copy protection using DVD Decrypter. Now I had a bunch of VOB (Video Object) files. A DVD movie is one continuously MPEG-2 file in a transport stream. But for simplicity the VOB has a max limit of 1 Gb, so before I could input the VOB files into FFmpeg, I had to find a way to merge the VOB files into one file. Thankfully this is easy, all you have to do is to merge the files – and you can use Windows’ copy function for this – as long as you remember to set the binary switch (/b):

copy /b vts_01_2.vob + vts_01_3.vob + vts_01_4.vob + vts_01_5.vob mergedfile.vob

I omitted the first file vts_01_1.vob since it contained the menu.