I had a bunch of old DVDs that I wanted to rip and save on my qnap for viewing later. However, Generally ripping a DVD gets you multiple VOB files that most of the players can’t play sequentially. You would want the DVD to be ripped to a single large video file that can be played by any player.
There are many commercial products available, but I wanted a freeware product. Finally I found 2 that did the job beautifully
1. Rip DVD To MPEG file Using Vob2mpeg
Vob2Mpeg will get you 1 file for each title in the DVD. Basic version is free and is very fast. They have a pro version too that claims to be 3 times faster. For me basic version was good enough.
2. Join MPEG using ffmpeg or using Dos command.
ffmpeg is very well known among Linux users, combined with bash script in Linux, it can pretty much do anything you want to do to your videofile. There is a windows version too that’s equally powerful. You can combine your mpeg files using a single command in ffmpeg
ffmpeg -f concat -i mylist.txt -c copy output
Where mylist.txt containts path to your video files in the following format.
file '/path/to/file1' file '/path/to/file2' file '/path/to/file3'
Another way of doing it is through age old Dos copy command . copy command will only work for linear files like an MPEG, in my case it worked but it may not work in some cases. Copy command will simply take 2 files and join them together as a single binary. With most of the Video formats this method won’t work, but it’s quick and dirty so you may want to try it.
copy /b Title_1.mpg + Title_2.mpg combined.mpg