YadeX. You can go down to the clip level and extract as a stream, and end up with the mpeg2 and AAC audio files just for that short clip. It includes a preview window so you can browse through the dozens of clips that make up the film, and make sure you are extracting only the part you want.

http://www.macetvideo.com/dl_center/dl_center.html

Download the US or French version, whatever you speaketh.

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Handbrake (which is an all-around drop-dead awesome bit of code) doesn't handle single .VOB files. However, as of 0.7, it encode any range of chapters. This should cut the encoding time quite a bit.

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I should add that you'll of course still need to use something to convert it to DV if you're going to edit with it. ffmpegX is my favorite for going from mpeg2 to DV. You'll add the AC3 (I said AAC before, whoops, BIG difference) file in the Audio tab so your DV file will be complete and ready to drop into iMovie or FCE/P.

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Anyone know of a free Mac OSX app that can convert a single VOB file to any of the following MPEG-1, MPEG-4, Quicktime, AVI?

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How about using SnapzProX?

http://www.ambrosiasw.com/utilities/snapzprox/

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Way to complex! First off all I gotta say is CINEMATIZE!!! Rip the Chapter with "Mactheripper" then throw that into Cinematize set it for the type you want it transcoded to... I would recommend straight DV (Same format iMovie works with as it is what Mini DV cams record in)... then you can do what you please with it!

Trust me you will save a lot of time and it works!

Steps:

1.) Rip DVD or Chapter Need with Mactheripper (Find on versiontracker.com)

2.) Take the ripped footage and throw it into Cinematize (Also look on versiontracker.com for it)

3.) Let Er' Rip! and in sometime you will be left with Raw DV footage which you can effortlessly edit etc.. in iMovie!

Good Luck Homie!

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Mactheripper = FREE

Cinematize = Demo (or get creative... "surfer")

iMovie = You Got it!

Priceless!!!

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There's a great free application called MPEG Streamclip that will encode straight from a DVD .vob file to DV-NTSC, or just about anything else you can think of. It's awesome and, did I mention, free.

http://www.alfanet.it/squared5/mpegstreamclip.html

systemsboy
http://systemsboy.blogspot.com/

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Everyone is suggesting nice software, but Yade X is the only one that addresses the specific need of this person posing the question. He's not wanting the whole DVD, he's not even wanting entire chapters, which can still be unweildy. He just wants clips.

YadeX is the *only* free solution that will let you dive into not only the individual chapters, not only the individual Cells, but the very small Objects that actually make up the VOB stream. Chapters are at minimum MINUTES of video. Cells are SECONDS of video, usually less than 10, and Objects are the individual portions of the mpeg2 stream at each GOP point, so there may be as many as 1000 Objects for 10 seconds of video.

I doubt he needs THAT low of a level, but the Cell level he definitely needs, and working with 5-20 seconds of video at a time is exponentially less weildy than any of the proposed solutions working with chunks as large as chapters.

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If you want 3 minutes worth, It would take about 6 minutes to get it on your computer.

Here is a program for the Mac:
http://mac.softpedia.com/get/Utilities/Screen-Movie-Recorder.shtml

I take a Tape Recorder, output my audio jack to the tape player, push play on the DVD and record on the tape player and record on the screen movie recorder. When you are finished, you have a quicktime movie. Then record the audio from the tape player to the computer. Merge the two in iMovie then iDVD.

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Thanks systemsboy, MPEG Streamclip works great for converting single VOB files.

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If you happen to have a PC sitting around, DVDShrink will allow you to cut individual clips out of a movie with nice slider controls and previews. It's truly impressive. Nothing quite like it on the Mac, sadly, although Yadex comes the closest.

After you have the VOB extracted, use ffmpegx to convert it to whatever format you like. You may need to "demux" the VOB - split it into audio and video - before converting it. ffmpegx can do that if you forgot to do it in yadex. If you're working with iMovie, DV is a nice format to convert it to.

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I've had to get clips from DVD's also. My method was probably the ghetto way but it works great depending on your equipment. I have acess to a iMac G5 that I pop the movie into and then set up my Panasonic DVX-100 MiniDV camera to record the movie full screen. I run the audio out from the iMac into the camera's audio input via a minijack to XLR cable. Make sure I've got the camera set up right and the audio I found I had to pan all the way left on the iMac. This works great.

5 minutes setup time
3 minutes of recording (for your three minute clip)
3 minutes of importing from Camera to iMovie

So around 12 minutes and it's done. Depending on your camera you'll excellent quality.

Note: If the movie is in widescreen mode then very litte pan and scan will be necessary.

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On a side note, what is the easiest way to rip the main part of a dvd to divx/xvid/h264 on Tiger? I can do this pretty easily on PC, but I would like to use my mac to do it. I have almost 400 dvd's that I'm going to rip to a media server I have in my house. Every TV in the house has a modified xbox that can pull these files across the network. That way, I can access every movie from every TV.

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i just drag all the contents of the dvd to my external harddrive, and open the ts.folder in dvd player. works flawlessly everytime.

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I use MacTheRipper to get the VOB off of the DVD and then I use MPEG Streamclip. There is one catch. You need to have the Quicktime MPEG-2 encoder to use MPEG Streamclip for the VOB file. The encoder is $20 from apple. Everything has been flawless for me. Never had a problem, and when you bring the VOB into MPEG Streamclip you can edit it down to whatever you need and then convert it to whatever format you want. Works like a charm (at least for me it has).

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You guys rock!

I've been checking out the different suggestions, downloading a lot of software. For my purpose, YadeX turned out to be great, allowing me to select even tiny bits of the DVD. For converting into DV for iMovie to import, I ended up using mpegStreamclip as ffmpegX needed some compilation of an encoder - turned out I wasn't geeky enough. And mpegStreamclip can do the same with whole .vobs which can come in pretty handy I reckon. Had to buy Apple's mpeg2playback - which is cheap anyway. And for clips that don't need to be edited, QT Pro does the job. All in all, just the time-saving advice I was looking for.

Cinematize looks nice, I'll look into that as well. On a PC sidenote, ShrinkDVD appears to be far more elegant than DVDx - nice1.

Again: Thanks to all of you for great suggestions - and to C.K. for bringing your attention to my trouble.

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ffmpegX's install looks intimidating, but it's really not (I did it last night). Go to this page, and it has links to the three binaries you need. Just drop those *somewhere*, it doesn't matter where, and tell ffmpegX where they are. If it gives you a 'file not found' message, the directory that it's trying to copy to probably doesn't exist. Just go to the shell, and 'sudo mkdir' it.

It's a little more complicated than click-drag-install, but not much.

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I second the MPEG Streamclip nomination. It's great for selecting in and out points and converting to quicktime (H264 crashes the current version). It doesn't require converting entire chapters - and it's free. You may need to get the QT MPEG2 decoder from Apple though.

Mac the Ripper to rip the DVD to disc.
MPEG Streamclip to grab selections.

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I've also used DropDV to convert the MPEG video to a DV file, which iMovie can use. Check out:

http://www.dropdv.com/

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