MKVToolNix GUI for the win!

If you look at some of my recent blogs you'll find the history of my fight with ripped home movie DVDs that didn't work out as easily as I'd hoped.

I think I finally found the best answer so far.

Track order weird

For some reason, DVDs recorded with my Samsung DVD recorder from VHS have VOB files with mismatched streams. Some of the VOBs have video first, some audio first, some dvd track information.

The means that MakeMKV fails when trying to rip to an MKV. I also tried to stitch the raw VOBs (because they aren't encrypted) using mkvmerge and LosslessCut. It ended up being possible because I can manually specify track order using ffmpeg to modify the VOB files first.

MKVToolNix GUI to the resuce

I thought I'd tried this one before and it didn't work but I couldn't ever seem to reproduce the first way I tried.

Now it just seems to work, automatically fixing the track issues with no fuss.

• Right click in the source files box and select Attach files
• Select the first VOB from file explorer - it should automatically pull in sequentially numbered files
• Give it a destination file name
• Click Start multiplexing

Boom, the finished audio file should be a single working mkv video file of your DVD. You can then take it into LosslessCut to split into multiple files or directly to Handbrake to encode to H264 or another more modern codec.