My Life

I was recently given a movie from a friend that was in the usual DVD format (VOB) which I had wanted to convert to AVI for myself so that it would use up less space on my computer hard drive without loosing the video quality.

I had been searching everywhere for programs that would do the job, but most programs out there would fail during the conversion or even when they would succeed would churn out horribly disgusting videos with video and audio out of sync.

This is when I had found avi.NET. avi.NET takes VOB files from your DVD and converts them to DVD without a fuss.

The program works like this:

1. You select the first VOB file on your DVD
2. avi.NET will then index that file
3. After indexing it will load and play the movie in the main window to give you a preview of the movie before it is converted to AVI
4. You can select the screen size you wish to use for the movie and the output size of the AVI file (the smaller the output size the worse the quality)
5. Choosing a file size of around 700Mb – 900Mb with a resolution of around 720 or 640 should give you DVD like quality
6. Then it’s a matter of selecting your AVI codec either DivX or XviD (if you don’t care or have no idea just leave it on XviD)
7. Then selecting a few miscellaneous options like clearing temporary files which avi.NET makes and shutting down the computer after the conversion
8. And finally clicking Add and Start

The total conversion time of my movie took around 5 hours starting at 9pm ending just after 2am. This may seem long but if you wish to obtain the same quality of video with the size of AVI files you are going to have to wait.

I had chosen a resolution of 720 and a file size of 898Mb. The video turned out perfect with no audio out of sync.

If you wish to convert multiple DVD’s overnight you may wish to first copy the VOB files onto your hard drive and then run index.NET. index.NET is part of avi.NET which index’s the VOB files for you in it’s own small application getting them ready for avi.NET.

You can index VOB files from multiple movies in index.NET first and then load them into avi.NET. avi.NET will then convert all the movies one by one, which means overnight you could get around 3 movies done depending on the quality and size of the output files.

I was personally amazed that a freeware like avi.NET could actually produce a near perfect AVI replica of the DVD movie.

One downside to converting your DVD’s to AVI is the loss of the 5.1 surround sound audio, but that really is up to the individual.

If you’ve ever wanted to convert your DVD’s to AVI, then you really can’t go past avi.NET. Not only does do what is says it does, but it does it with little interaction from the user with perfect results.

Thanks,

Marat