How to convert VIDEO_TS folder to video format

FFmpeg also works quite well:

cat ./VIDEO_TS/*.VOB | ffmpeg -i - <out_name>.<out_format>

Source:

https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/FFmpeg#VOB_to_any_container

HandBrake is a general-purpose, open-source, cross-platform, multithreaded video transcoder software application which is more than capable of reading the VIDEO_TS folder and converting it to a file format of your choice.

K9Copy is a powerful tool that can read a VIDEO_TS directory structure (or a DVD) and produce (re-encode) MPEG-4 video files. It also supports MPEG-2 extraction, which is useful for creating lossless backups (one MPEG-2 video file will be created for every episode/video on the DVD). It is possible to only copy the English audio track and subtitles.

To install K9Copy on Ubuntu, you need to enable the multiverse repository, either by changing the config file or by using the Software Sources gui. Other distributions like Fedora have it in their default repository.