Posts: 4
Joined: Nov 2009
Reputation:
0
I assume I am one of the few people left that has not converted my movies from VOB's yet... I have quite a few so it would take considerable time and effort. Anyways, am I the only one that can't play VOB's on my Android yet? Tried on my Galaxy Nexus, Nexus 7 and 10... none work. "could not play file"... is the codec not included? Thanks.
Posts: 2,771
Joined: Mar 2011
Reputation:
96
DVD VOBs are simply MPEG-2 files in multiple chunks with some extra metadata. You can concatenate them together into one big file, rename it to .MPG and see what happens (still time-consuming to do it with a lot of files, though, since you're copying 4.5Gb+ at a time, plus you might hit filesystem limitations with large files, dependent on your OS).
You could always try moboplayer or VLC to see if you have more luck, of course...
Posts: 4
Joined: Nov 2009
Reputation:
0
Tried the vobmerge method... way too time consuming (over 900 movies... not going to happen), same with converting... even batch converting can be pretty painful. I would love to just keep the movies the way they are, and since I read that the Android version will play all the formats the PC version, appletv version, live version etc will play, I thought I would be good to go... guess not. I already tried moboplayer, and it works alright, except that it has to load the new .vob every time (usually 4 to 5 .vobs per movie), xbmc is seamless. not to mention the moboplayer UI is a bit clunky, which is why I love XBMC...
Posts: 2,771
Joined: Mar 2011
Reputation:
96
I'm clean out of VOBs to do any testing for you on my systems - if I get a chance, I'll rip something and have a look, though, to see what my XBMC builds see.
Your points are well made - you'll need a spare lifetime or two to work through that lot. Even re-encoding to MPEG4 and the 2TB+ of space it'd free up might not be appealing enough to put up with that!
Posts: 4
Joined: Nov 2009
Reputation:
0
I thought for sure that there would be other users out there complaining about this, but I guess I'm the only one using VOB's on a 4.2 tablet. Space (TB's) isn't an issue, if it was I would definitely start converting, thanks for the help though.
Posts: 2,771
Joined: Mar 2011
Reputation:
96
I just dug out an old ISO and extracted the contents as a test - navigating via Files view to the VIDEO_TS folder and playing it called up the VOB files with a small hiccough (the menu flashed past rather than allowing me to select anything, but that could be a ripping artefact), but it otherwise played fine. At the end of the first VOB, it paused briefly and then handed over to the next one - so not exactly seamless, but it worked and certainly didn't complain about formats at all. This was on an i9300 SGS3 with 4.1.
Posts: 4
Joined: Nov 2009
Reputation:
0
Sweet, must be a 4.2 issue then. I guess it's just a waiting game then, as I'm sure the final version will fix this issue, thanks for your troubleshooting.
