ANATOMY OF A DVD DISC

(Sample: Walt Disney's "A Bug's Life", region 1 version)

When looking at the directory of the disc you'll find something like this:

 Volume in drive U is BUGSLIFE Volume Serial Number is CFF7-9D52

Directory of U:
VIDEO_TS       <DIR>        02-26-99  7:28p VIDEO_TS
         0 file(s)              0 bytes
         1 dir(s)            0.00 MB free

The directory VIDEO_TS Contains files like *.BUP, *.IFO, *.VOB.

The *.IFO files has information like REGIONCODE. I'm not sure what else,...

I suspect the *.BUP files contain the subtitles,...

Only some of the *.VOB files are relevant for ripping process,... leaving us these files:
(tip: you can play each VOB with VLC to test what they are)

Relevant:

VTS_02_1.VOB - 4:3, First block of the movie in 4:3 format

VTS_02_2.VOB - 4:3, Second block of the movie

VTS_02_3.VOB - 4:3, Third block of the movie

VTS_02_4.VOB - 4:3, Fourth block of the movie

VTS_03_1.VOB - 16:9, First block of the movie in 16:9 format

VTS_03_2.VOB - 16:9, Second block of the movie

VTS_03_3.VOB - 16:9, Third block of the movie

VTS_03_4.VOB - 16:9, Fourth block of the movie

VTS_04_1.VOB - 4:3, Bonus movie (chess-player)

VTS_05_1.VOB - Credits & outtakes (bloopers)

Irrelevant:

VIDEO_TS.VOB - FBI warning and Walt Disney logo,.. Who needs this...

VTS_01_0.VOB - Menu caption,... we don't need that either

VTS_01_1.VOB - Black screen no sound,... we can skip that too...

VTS_02_0.VOB - 4:3, Menu pages, like special features, skip to scene, etc,... garbage aswell

VTS_03_0.VOB - 16:9, Menu pages, like special features, skip to scene, etc,... garbage too

Multiple audio tracks ?

A VOB file contains all audio tracks included on the DVD. So if there where these audio tracks:

* Dolby 5.1 English

* regular stereo English

* German sync

* French sync

Then you'd find multiple AC3 tracks when using VOBSnoopy to rip out the audio,...

First scene ?

Each movie starts with a VOB with a size of app 1,073,709,056 bytes (or Windows: 1,048,544Kb).

Splitting a VOB

Splitting a VOB in audio and video can be done with VOBSNOOPY.EXE, which extracts all sub files into AC3 and MPV/M2V files.

If the VOB contains multiple AC3 (English, French, Spanish, etc) audio tracks then VOBSNOOPY will extract these seperatly.

Each AC3 track will be enumerated: AUDIOxx.AC3, figure out which one you'de like to keep,...

An example:

VTS_02_1.VOB (1,048,544Kb) splits into audio00.AC3 (80,972Kb) and video.m2v (955,037Kb).

Having a VOB with multiple audio tracks in it, you can save space by eliminating the foreign languages...