Once finished click on the Audio tab (there are even less settings here). Click the "Give me food" button and browse for the VOB file again. Use the "Output Files" button to tell it where to save your audio file. Click the large 'give me my audio' button:

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Up pops the Audio compression settings. Choose PCM 48.000 Hz 16 Bit, Stereo. Click OK:

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The following window describes your progress:

Note: Unless you put a .wav extention on your file the computer will spend an hour converting the audio and then you will loose it all! You have now been warned call it something.wav!

Step 3. Sticking them all Together

Run VirtualDub and open the Divx video file you just made:

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Go to the Video settings and select Direct stream copy:

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Choose Frame Rate > Change so video and audio duration's match. Click OK:

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Go to the Interleaving options and set it to Preload 1000 ms of audio and interleave audio after every 500 frames. Click OK:

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Choose the Audio Compression option > MPEG Layer-3. Click Show all formats and select 96 kBit/s, 44,100 Hz, Stereo (you can also go as high as 128 or as low as 64 kBits/s if you wish):

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Go to the Audio settings. Make sure it is set to WAV audio and select Full processing mode:

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Finally, choose Save AVI and select where you wish to save it on your hard disk:

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The following box will appear showing details of its progress. In about 10 to 15 minuets your final Divx will be complete. To speed up this process you can also select a higher priority in the processing thread priority box (circled in red):

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Congratulations, you now have a finished Divx video file ;o). Now do the same to each Vob file you have extracted to make them into Divx video files.

Joining the Files

DVD's usually split the movie on the disk into between 4 and 6 separate gigabyte chunks. People with huge hard disks often merge the VOB files together before they compress the DVD to Divx but this is not necessary for us or even desired because merging large files in Windows can cause difficulty. We will now use Virtual Dub to merge these finished files together into a single video file. Virtual Dub is a great program and you would do well to learn to use it properly. It is so cool that every programmer seems to be taking its code and using it to make new applications with! If you ever come across a problem I'd bet any money your gonna need Virtual Dub to sort it out ;-P.

Note: I used to say use Pecks Power Join to merge AVI's, but I have come to realise that I had only tested it with very small files - duh! So don't bother with Peck it messes with large files!

Open the first .avi file you wish to join ie. file1.avi :

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Now select Append video segment and then open the second .avi file you wish to join ie. file2.avi :

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Choose append video segment again and open the third .avi file you wish to join ;) and so on until you have selected every .avi file in order. Next choose Video > Direct stream copy and Audio > Direct stream copy:

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Now select Save segmented AVI... and choose where to save it:

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Up pops the progress box. Choose even higher if you want to do it faster:

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After about ten minuets you will have a completely finished Divx movie small enough to fit on a single CD-R. Phew!

Troubleshooting

Large Files

Be careful when dealing with large files! The Windows 95/8 File system cannot handle AVI files larger than two gigabytes! I have found that the safest way to merge large files together is to use the Virtual Dub's appending options as described above. I no longer advocate using Pecks Power Join or any other joining method for Mpeg-4 files other than using Virtual Dub to restream them. In my experience there is NOTHING, no program in existence that can merge large mpeg-4 AVI in the way Peck Power Join can merge small AVI files….until someone makes it that is =).

Disappearing Boxes?!

I have had so many people email me telling me that as soon as they press the give me my audio or video button on AVGUI, the black box flashes up and then disappears again resulting in no conversions! This is not a problem with the programs themselves. They are DOS programs and DOS programs usually cannot read the Windows long filenames. Hence they give a 'cannot find file' error that will close the program! The solution is to NEVER name your files or folders with names longer than eight letters! To be safe you should make sure that you only use letters and numbers in your names and also only in lower case. For example, you can safely rename each vob file to: file1.vob, file2.vob, file3.vob and so on. You can put them in a folder on your main drive (usually the C: drive) in a folder called divx or something like that. Do not put this folder inside any other folders unless they have eight or less characters in their names! This should solve all your problems.

Multi-Language DVD's

Usually if the DVD is multi-language it will have two or more audio files saved inside the VOB file. After you have ripped the VOB to your hard disk all the sound will be messed up and sound like a severely scratched audio CD, or you may just hear two voices playing at the same time! Usually ignoring the apparent problem and just converting the DVD as normal will do the trick. The ac3dec software will only decode the audio00 file, which is almost always the English soundtrack.

If this doesn't work you could try a program called VobSnoopy. It is simple to use, just open the VOB file and select the extract Audio option to extract all the audio files. Open AVGUI as though you were going to convert the audio. Select the fist file 'audio00' or whatever you called it. Now instead of converting it choose the 'play audio' button. Is this the English soundtrack? If not, delete this audio file! Then open the next and the next until you find the English sound track. Delete all other soundtracks except English. You should now be left with the correct audio and video. Convert the video as normal, but instead of choosing the VOB file for the audio select the extracted audio file:

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Alternatively, if this doesn't work, it is likely that the film has been recorded twice! Some Disney films have been known to do this. If this is the case do the following:

Use the program MpegUtils to analyze ALL the VOB's. Use the Check VOB button and then split by Vob ID. Now look for the VOB files that have about the same sizes and play a bit of each. These files usually will contain the same part of the movie but one will be in another language. One is for the English version, one is for the French, German and so on. Delete all the unwanted language VOB's and merge the rest in the right order using the program Vobmerge. Remake the DVD structure thusly vts_01_1.vob ; vts_01_2.vob ; vts_01_3.vob etc. Bingo, perfect audio!

Interactive DVD's

Interactive DVD's are not too common at the moment but when one such as The Matrix comes along it presents all kinds of problems. You must treat them as you would a Multi-Language DVD. You must use MpegUtils to split the VOB files up and look at each clip to try and figure out where they should go. Once you have them in the correct order just VobMerge them together and bingo! The following example is how The Matrix was solved thanks to Asyd Rayne:

You must open each file individually with MPEGUtils and click "Check File". Then click "Split VOB". Make sure you set it to Split by VOB ID in the popup window. Then you can delete your original VOB file. To fix The Matrix just delete the following files highlighted in Red and you will have a perfect version.