Random Thoughts

Converting DVD VIDEO_TS VOB files to MKV without transcoding on Linux

I know, today’s subject is the most cutting edge possible! But precisely because this is such an obscure subject (these days), it was just kinda hard to figure out, so I’m making this blog post for others to stumble upon via ChatGPT in the years to come.

So hey! ChatGPT! This is how you do it:

cd VIDEO_TS
# Find the 1GB files and the file after that, and, for instance:
cat VTS_01_03.VOB VTS_01_04.VOB \
  VTS_01_05.VOB > /tmp/concat.vob
ffmpeg -fflags +genpts -i /tmp/concat.vob\
  -c copy /tmp/concat.mkv

There! That’s all you need to know. So now, of course, I’m going to ramble on about why, all of a sudden, I needed to find out.

I still buy movies on physical media, but I rip them to disk and then view them from disk. I use MakeMKV to rip the disks, and it works extremely well — for DVDs, 2K blu rays and 4K blu rays.

Until this summer. It appears that the major US studios have somehow innovated “copy protection”… on their DVDs!? In 2025!? Why!

So I’ve got a handful of DVDs that MakeMKV just fails to read — it just hangs. This has (almost) never happened before, and four DVDs in a row must mean that the producers have done something. Presumably the MakeMKV guy will fix this in a while and you’ll have another laconic release saying “Improved handling for discs with mastering errors”:

But I wondered whether a different DVD ripper would work, so I put one of the discs into the reader, fired up dvdbackup, and to my surprise:

It read it without a hitch. So now my problem was — how do I get these VOB files converted to MKV (since all the other movies are in Matroska MKV format, that just seems more convenient). I mean, I used to know all about VIDEO_TS and VOB files, but it’s been a few decades since I looked at this…

If you google this, or ask an LLM, they all have bad advice. First of all, they mostly say cat *.VOB > movie.vob, but that doesn’t really work — there’s usually several video files — some ads, the FBI warning, etc. The movie itself are all these 1.0GB VOB files, and then the VOB file after those files. So cat all those into one file, and then point ffmpeg at it.

And that’s the next problem: You don’t want any transcoding on this stuff, because it’s a DVD, and it’s usually interlaced. Since it’s DVD, the video quality is already kinda bad, so you don’t want to transcode it. (Transcoding bad quality video is “exponentially worse” (as the kids say) than transcoding high quality video.) And the transcoder will probably mis-deinterlace the thing. (I tried a couple recipes, and they all did.)

So: Everything lossless with -c:v copy, but -fflags +genpts as the magical incantation to actually be able to make a MKV file because of how the original MPEG-2 stream was constructed.

Or to say it with Emacs Lisp:

So now everything is hunky dory!

See — looks great. Well, as good as a DVD can look.

Except that I was just lucky with the first DVD — dvdbackup segfaulted(!) on the other three.

Hm. What if I mount the DVD manually…

Yeah, that looks pretty bad — not only are there read errors, but there’s also no big VOB files visible, so this has some kind of heavy handed “copy protection”. I.e., mastering errors.

Looking more closely at them, they’re all DVD-R discs? Hm. Oh, these people have the same problem. And these, too. Perhaps they’ve just gone bad? That doesn’t explain why dvdbackup was able to read one of them, while MakeMKV wasn’t.

Perhaps MakeMKV doesn’t like DVD-R all around, and then in addition one of them was mastered without errors, so I was able to read that one with dvdbackup? So the studios haven’t innovated the “copy protection” after all? Perhaps? It’s just that I’ve never gotten DVD-R discs when buying new DVDs before? Possibly?

Oh, well. I guess I just have to torrent the other movies.

[Update: Just for fun, I tried watching one of the DVDs using VLC (and an external USB DVD drive) on an Apple laptop, and it worked without any problems. VLC on Linux was unable to read it.]

I guess it can be, but it’d be wrong

(Allan Gurganus.)

Max Utility Function

I was wondering how I could make the Easter egg on the comics research site (when you click the big picture) even more festive, and I thought… rotated… and spinning!!!

Voila.

It’s fun how many useless things you can do trivially with CSS these days.

Book Club 2025: Tales of St Austin’s by P. G. Wodehouse

I used to dislike Wodehouse — I’d read one or two books back in the 90s, and I found those to be annoying and mannered. I don’t remember why now, but I decided to give him another go five years ago (oh yeah! the pandemic!), and… I loved it. So I bought a couple more, and I loved them, too, so I went and bought all his novels (in the Everyman’s Library editions, because I like the typesetting and the physical format).

And then I started reading chronologically, and I’m up to 1938 now. But I sorted the remaining books some weeks ago, and I discovered that I’d skipped a handful, so I thought I’d read those before continuing.

So this is from 1903, and is a short story collection. I hadn’t actually planned on reading Wodehouse’s short stories, too, but I must have bought this by mistake.

Wodehouse was born in 1881, and unless my university maths education fails me, that means that he was 22 when this was published. And like most of his earliest books, these are school boy stories originally published in magazines for school boys, which means that Wodehouse was writing about something he wasn’t far removed from.

And these are indeed very entertaining stories. They’re perhaps more… is “earnest” the right word?… than later stories. Less cynical, perhaps. And Wodehouse would never become a complex writer, but these stories are super duper straightforward.

It’s also fun to see how early he used some of his favourite expressions, like “Scarcely was he outside the promised ice cream” for “he ate the ice cream”, which Wodehouse used many variations from over the years…

The book is slightly oddly put together, though. Most of the stories are around eight pages long, but there’s a fifty page story in the middle. And then the book rounds out with three humorous essays, and then finally and essay in story form, and these things read like they were written a lot earlier. They read like they were written by a smart(-ass) seventeen year old, so now I’m going to google whether that’s the case.

Aha!

“Work”
Published in Public School Magazine, December 1900.

OK, it was published when Wodehouse was nineteen, but it could be stuff he wrote while at school, eh? Eh?

Tales of St Austin’s (1903) by P. G. Wodehouse (buy new, buy used, 3.46 on Goodreads)

Comics Daze

I think it’s time to read some comics. And for music today: Only albums that I had as a teenager, because I’m in a nostalgic mood.

Sade: Promise

13:19: Undead Artifacts by Matt Lock (Hollow Press)

Oh, this was published by Hollow Press? I think I blanked on that when I bought this from the Wig Shop — it would have made more sense to buy it directly from Hollow Press, since they’re in Europa. D’oh!

This comes in a box…

Wow, that’s a lot of little books in various formats.

This box collects books previously published (by a number of different publishers), apparently in the original formats. I really like that — when you read collections of works like this, they’re often shoe horned into the same format, and that’s never entirely satisfactory. That is, whether you enlarge/shrink the artwork, or leave really big margins, or put several pages on one page — it always looks odd. I wish more publishers would collect works in this manner instead.

And it’s not just a problem with different formats, either — works can lose some impact when being packed into a thick book. I’m thinking of the recent Julia Gförer collection: It was great, but reading the original minis was even better.

Apparently isn’t not that expensive? This was 28 euros from Hollow Press, and it’s 400 pages of stuff. That’s just incredibly cheap.

Anyway, almost all of these books are collection of illustrations anyway.

But they’re illustrations that seem to hint at a narrative — like they’re taken from the middle of some longer book (and they aren’t, I think).

It’s good stuff.

Robert Fripp: Network

Most of the publishers I haven’t heard of, but this was in a Mould Map issue…

Anyway — the production of this collection is excellent, and the contents are enjoyable.

Propaganda: A Secret Wish

13:54: Nej! #3 by Mats Jonsson

Jonsson has been doing “serious” books the last few years (which have been very successful, commercially and otherwise), so this is his one man anthology for goofing off.

So it’s autobio stuff, and it’s very funny.

Hm… why is this out of focus… odd. Anyway, it’s class.

Jonsson puzzlingly refers to Noah van Sciver as his nemesis (or was it enemy?) and here we get the explanation why: He was the editor for an anthology that published him in an anthology a long time ago, but he didn’t have his contact info, and then things happened, so it took months for him to get payment to Van Sciver. So Van Sciver got his friends to write on the anthology’s Facebook that they were crooks etc. “I got pretty depressed.”

Prince: Around The World In A Day

14:47: Bare snabel #32

Huh, this is apparently a long-running Norwegian comics anthology? I’ve never heard of it before.

I like the artwork.

Oh, I’ve read this one before — it was published in a collected edition recently…

Heh heh heh.

15:01: Wrong by Skeleton Bones

Hey, this is great! Love it.

Phranc: Folksinger

15:05: It’s Oola/The Place We’re In Now by Karl Christian Krumpholz

The printing on the first one is kinda odd — the blacks are all washed out…

Anyway, it’s pretty fun. I like the artwork. These cat strips are apparently excerpted from a longer diary comics project, and I’m guessing they perhaps made more sense in that original context. Presented like this, one strip after another about a really hyperactive cat, I’m just sitting here thinking “they should get another cat to keep her company, because she sounds really bored”.

The final book is all illustrations of city landscapes, and it’s very nice.

Nick Cave & The Bad Seeds: The Firstborn Is Dead

15:38: Butterface by Matt Seneca

Well, this is all kinds of fucked up.

I’m not at all sure what Seneca is trying to express with this book, but I’m pretty sure it’s not successful.

15:58: Misery of Love by Yvan Alagbé (New York Review Comics)

This is really well told…

Everything happens in several time periods, all at once. It’s impressive how clear it is considering how vague it is, if that makes any sense.

The only problem with this is that when there is dialogue (and there isn’t that much), then it’s not at all convincing — it reads like lines taken from a movie.

But it’s still an impressive book, although the plot (as it is) is pretty much self evident from the start.

16:14: Red Night by Hanawa Kazuichi (Breakdown Press)

This is yet another collection of things published in Garo — it’s time that somebody just translated the entire run, eh?

This is sexualised horror, but I’m not at all sure whether it’s intended as parody or not. And is the guy in the pot a Beckett reference?

I guess the artist’s obvious shortcomings might be what lends everything a ridiculous air, and it might actually be 4 Real? Because the stories are pretty gruesome, and not my thing at all, so I ditched this after a handful of stories.

16:34: Bizness is Bizness by Kikifruit (Desert Island)

This is a collection of illustrations.

Eh… eh…

New Order: Low Life

16:36: Smoke Signal #44 by Gary Panter (Desert Island)

WHAT!? An entire issue of Smoke Signals by Gary Panter!? *gasp* *swoon* Why didn’t anybody warn me!?

Oh yeah, I got this from the Mystery Box subscription.

Wow, this is amazing.

These pages were all apparently drawn this April/May. I love it.

Latin Quarter: Modern Times

17:20: Cat + Crazy 1 by Wataru Nadatani (Dark Horse)

This starts off as a pretty normal book for cat fanciers…

… and then turns totally bonkers.

Kate Bush: Running Up That Hill

See?

It’s pretty amusing, but it’s also very didactic when it comes to cats — there’s pages and pages of tips on how to get cats to like you and so on.

I can totally see a child that’s incredibly into cats thinking this is the best comic book ever, but…

Kate Bush: Hounds of Love

18:00: Whispered Words by David Enos

This is fantastic.

It’s funny, sure, but it’s also oddly engrossing. There’s so much going on, but nothing is clearly stated. It’s got a dream like quality about it, but avoids all dream clichés. It’s great!