.vob 4:3 to 14:9

[JPB77]

I have a .vob from a DVD on harddisk (decrypted by DVDFab) but its
in 4:3 format. Can anyone tell me if its possible to convert this to 14:9 and retain it as a .vob file - I think if I converted to a .avi or .mpeg some quality is lost.

thanks

[signals]

JPB77
Is the movie in the VOB actually 4:3, like an old movie or an old TV show? You can trick a player into thinking it is 16:9 widescreen by doing some editing in the IFO files of the DVD but it will make everything in the picture look squashed. You can also use DVD Ripper or Video Converter to crop the picture into a widescreen aspect ratio, but it will cut content off the top and bottom of the video. It may take some changes to whatever profile you use in DVD Ripper since it will have to be tricked into doing something that it is not really designed to do, but it can be done, I had to do it once for an odd portable player I had.

[JPB77]

yes the movie in the vob is 4:3 as its from an old tv series.
so far I have decrypted it, copied it from hard drive to usb and played it on a tv but the tv plays it at 4:3 or in widescreen zoom whereas when it was played via a dvd player the tv would play it in 14:9 which was preferable to 4:3. will try the video converter on the decrypted file if I can find a 14:9 option - as you say 16:9 will not work well

[JPB77]

does anyone know how the .vob passthrough profile works - I have set some video effects to apply to a .vob and then used this profile as wanted to keep the file as a .vob - but pressing 'start' does not apply the effects!

[signals]

VOB Passthrough won't let you apply any changes. It only strips out the DVD-like components and passes the MPEG-2 video through to a new file. Use DVD Ripper to change the format using a profile that re-encodes (like h264) and make the cropping changes you want, then try convert it back to DVD/VOB using DVD Creator. See the captures below for the way to set up cropping an old 4:3 movie to widescreen.

[JPB77]

Re: DVDRipper to h264 and back to vob using DVD creator

will this retain the quality of the video - my experience of doing conversions
was that picture quality was lost - based on converting from .vob to .avi?

Also the second attachment looks like it will produce a picture that will not
fill the screen horizontally - my tv manages to convert 4:3 DVD input to 14:9
and fill horizontally (with a bit of crop) - so it ought to be possible

[signals]

I think if you choose the High Quality option on the Adanved Settings page (or Customize and set the bits/pixel to 0.25 or higher) you will be satisfied with the result, but this is subjective. You may even find that the h264 output is good enough that you do not need to re-convert it back to MPEG_2.

The picture can be made to fill the screen horizontally by adjusting the amount of vertical cropping. I just did it too quickly to produce the screen capture.

Keep in mind that doing this (4:3->16:9 cropping) is not a designed feature of DVDFab, Fab is just designed with the flexiblility that allows you to do it using portions of other features.

Update: MPEG-2 encoding will be added to Video Converter soon, so you will be able to skip the h264 step. Watch for it in the release notes in the coming weeks.