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I'm a novice VLC user, and want to convert some home movies that were ripped as .VOB files to .MP4. The goal is to more easily stream them from a network drive to my Roku player.
1. I did a test run and the files were converted, but there's no audio if I play them in Windows Media Player or Movies & TV. The audio is fine playing them with VLC. Am I doing something wrong? Is there a better format than .MP4 for what I want to do?
2. The VLC rips were separated into several 30 minute files rather than one longer file. I want to recombine them back to the original format. Can/should this be done before or after conversion?
3. Am I losing quality by converting them? They were originally on VHS tapes so the quality is pretty mediocre to begin with.
Well, a .VOB file comes from a formatted DVD. I used my DVR to record all my VHS tapes, and my DVR has a DVD recorder, after formatting the finished DVD, I put it in the DVD Rom drive of my computer, and use a free program called Handbrake. The Handbrake program will detect the DVD, and encode/convert it to MP4. In the settings for video framerate, select constant, and same as source. For quality setting, move the slider over to the right at about 16. For audio setting, pick MP3 and perhaps 192 bits for better sound quality. With VHS sound, if it was recorded in mono, be sure to select mono for the recording option, or it won't sound good. Many of my oldest VHS tapes had low or poor sound quality, but in the audio settings, there is an option to increase the gain, use this to make the sound louder. Once converted, the new MP4 files play fine with media player, VLC, and can be uploaded to youtube. Not sure which video editing program is best to join files together, but I'm sure it can be done, maybe the windows video editor can do it.
I do a lot of my editing and conversion through ffmpeg. It's fast and granular.
ffmpeg -i source.VOB -c:a copy converted.mp4
The -c:a copy portion instructs ffmpeg to preserve the audio as-is, which saves time. It defaults to using H.264 which is lossy, which is what you want when compressing a file for streaming purposes.
The following is a good breakdown of lossless vs lossy encoding standards:
Lossless Video Encoding (Uncompressed):
v210 (Can be contained in Quicktime MOV)
v410 (Can be contained in Quicktime MOV)
Uncompressed UYVY (Can be contained in Quicktime MOV or AVI)
Uncompressed YUY2 (Can be contained in Quicktime MOV or AVI)
Lossless Video Encoding (Compressed):
FFV1 (Fun fact, FFV1 is created by the developers of FFmpeg)
HuffYUV
Lagarith
H.264 Lossless
Apple Animation
OpenEXR (Technically this an image sequence format, but it’s almost exclusively used for motion picture)
Lossy Video Encoding:
H.264
HEVC (Also called H.265)
VP9
ProRes
DNxHD and DNxHR
AV1 (Still experimental at the time of writing)
A lot of this is above my pay grade. I tried Handbrake using the H.264 video encoder and AAC audio codec. The resulting .MP4 conversion had the same audio issue. No sound in either Media Player or Movies & TV, but plays fine in VLC. Should I use MP3 audio codec instead?
Happy to hear Turcoloco's suggestion worked for you. None of my MP4's ever had any sound problem with media player, when recorded with MP3 in Handbrake. I'm so happy I can finally play all those files now on my new TV with HDMI cable, and not have to use miracast or wifi. The built in graphics for computer was not getting the job done, so I found an old Radeon graphics card (35 watt) on Ebay for 10 bucks after checking the Dell site to see what works with my old 2015 computer. It puts out 1776 x 1000 resolution for the TV and looks much better, good enough. It took a while to figure out how to use display settings with 2 monitors, which ever one I selected as main, the other would be missing desktop icons and other functions. But then I discovered you can use the mouse to drag and drop any open window/program over to the other monitor. Just noticed today when I have 3 or 4 tabs open in my browser, I can pick up any one tab I want over to the TV, and leave the others intact on my monitor. Sweet. And I can easily switch from HDMI sound to computer speaker sound, in the taskbar. I think it's going to be a pretty good year all things considered.
Last edited by mofford; 01-11-2022 at 07:01 PM..
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