VOB merging: what command-line tool is recommended (Linux)?

Solution 1:

Assuming you only care about the vobs and not anything else on the dvd, you can simply cat them together:

cat *.vob > big.vob

will work just fine.

Solution 2:

The problem with simply concatenating VOB files is that the resulting VOB does not display the correct playback time or location in most media players as described here and here:

Typical problems are: timing issues, not being able to show the progress properly, no way to skip forward, crashes, missing audio, audio off sync, only showing the first 5 seconds of the video etc.

However, you can losslessly copy and merge the VOBs into a single MPG (since VOBs contain MPGs) which won't have the playback issues via ffmpeg; e.g.,

ffmpeg -i 'concat:VTS_01_1.VOB|VTS_01_2.VOB|VTS_01_3.VOB|VTS_01_4.VOB|VTS_01_5.VOB|VTS_01_6.VOB|VTS_01_7.VOB' -acodec copy -vcodec copy combined.mpg