Ripping from a DVD to AVI-- framerate problem?

Factual Questions
1

A friend of mine who heard that I was “pretty good” with computers asked me to do a favor for him. Basically, he took a bunch of his old VHS cassettes of home movies to one of those “we’ll do it for you” shops and had them convert them to DVD. Now, he wants me to get the video off of the DVDs so that he can e-mail clips to his friends, family, etc. Sounds easy enough, I guess, though I’ve never done this (though I’ve gotten to be a pro at going the opposite way).

Anyway, I found a site that walked me through doing this. Basically, I use a freeware program called DVDDecrypter to get the video off of the DVD – I end up with an m2v file and a WAV audio file. To join them, I’m told to use a program called VirtualDub (which also lets me set a video compression codec). Anyway, it seems that I’m having trouble synching up the audio and video.

When DVDDecrypter is done with the DVD, it tells me that the video is at 30fps, but when I load it in VirtualDub, it says it’s at 23.something. When I add the audio and save as AVI, the audio and video don’t synch up at all. DVDDecrypter tells me there’s no delay to the audio, so I should be able just to line them up at the beginning and put them together.

Has anyone had a similar experience? Even setting VirtualDub’s video framerate to “Set video framerate so that the video is the same length as the audio” doesn’t work-- I end up with bad synching. Should I use a different program to rip? What if I ripped a VOB? What could I then use to convert it to an MPEG-2 or AVI?

2

First off, if you’re not familiar with it, check out www.vcdhelp.com for a wealth of information. You may have to dig a bit, but I’m sure you could find out what is going on with your situation.

As for converting DVD to .avi, I encountered a similar problem when I tried to excerpt some footage from a DVD a guy gave me. A friend gave me a copy of a tool called DVDtoAVI and it worked like a charm. I am pretty sure he got the tool via the VCDhelp site (somewhere). I think this approach would suit what you’re trying to do. For starters, you end up with an avi containing both the audio and video. So you wouldn’t have to try to recombine them.

3

Thanks for the tip! vcdhelp.com is where I got the initial walkthrough using VirtualDub, but I’ll look for this DVDtoAVI program.

4

If you don’t care about menus and all that, there is a much easier way to do it. Use Windows Explorer to look at the files on the disk. Look in the folder called VIDEO_TS. Copy the *.vob files off the disk onto your hard drive. Then rename them to *.mpg. Presto! Check them to see which ones are actually the parts of the movie. Use Virtual Dub to splice them back into one large file.