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ffprobe – vob file stream information

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In my recent archiving project, moving home movies from DVDs and miniDV tapes, I've run into a number of issues.

One of those issues is that I've been having trouble ripping DVDs recorded on my Samsung DVD recorder. I've already documented part of my journey in this blog.

Analyze the data

I've been having a hard time nailing down exactly what's going on because I didn't have a tool to give objective information about the file. It seems every tool does some kind of manipulation to make the experience better, but it obfuscates what's actually there.

ffprobe

ffprobe is a handy utility that is part of the ffmpeg suite. It can analyze video files and show you data about them.

For my use I wanted to get info on the streams in the file. The order seems to matter when merging files so I needed a way to list the order.

ffprobe vts_01_1.vob 2>&1 | grep 'Stream'<br><br>// output<br>Stream #0:0[0x80]: Audio: ac3, 48000 Hz, stereo, fltp, 256 kb/s<br>Stream #0:1[0x1e0]: Video: mpeg2video (Main), yuv420p(tv, top first), 720x480 [SAR 8:9 DAR 4:3], Closed Captions, 29.97 fps, 29.97 tbr, 90k tbn

the breakdown

  • ffprobe: This is the command-line tool provided by FFmpeg for analyzing multimedia files.
  • vts_01_1.vob: This is the input video file that came from the DVD.
  • 2>&1: This part is redirecting the standard error (stderr) to the same location as the standard output (stdout). If you don't do this then grep won't work.
  • | grep 'Stream': This is to only show the streams as all the other information is extraneous for my current purpose.