My brother videotaped a musical recital by one of the children yesterday, and converted the video to DVD this morning (using a standalone DVD recorder). I wanted to edit the DVD so each performance is a separate chapter with title cards I thought we could use Windows Movie Maker, since it’s a free component of Windows XP Service Pack 2. But I can’t figure out how to get Windows Movie Maker to recognize the files on the DVD, which appear to have a .VOB extension.
Does anyone know how to use Windows Movie Maker to edit the DVD? Can you recommend something else free or low cost that can be used for this?
.vob files are actually not a lot more than MPEGs - in fact you might find that simply renaming them from .vob to .mpeg (I know how dumb this will sound to many people, but in the case of this particular file format, it really does usually work) will let you open them in movie maker.
If that doesn’t work, grab yourself a copy of a freeware program called VirtualDubMPEG - this will perform the conversion to AVI for you. (You can also use it to slice up the footage into chapters)
Thanks for the advice. I tried to rename the files to .mpg, but then they played for only nine seconds, despite being about a gigabyte in size each. I’ll look for that freeware program.
If VirtualDub doesn’t work out for you (it will work, but it might not be something you find comfortable to use), there are numerous other (free) ways to do it - check out the tools section of videohelp.com.
DVDX - DVDx 4.1 and XMPEG - http://www.xmpeg.net/website/ should also be capable of doing what you want to do.