How to get .vob files turned into .avi files so they can be imported into Windows 7 Moviemaker

Geek post.

I just spent a day trying out various programs so I thought I'd post the way I finally succeeded in ripping my files from a dvd of a concert onto my hard drive and converting them to a file format which is compatible with Windows 7 Movie Maker.

The dvd has a folder on it called VIDEO_TS and in it were a bunch of files. The only ones which turned out to matter in this project were the ones with .vob extension. There was series of them, all with the same length (1,048,544 KB) and creation time. I eventually figured out they were the whole concert broken into five pieces.

I found it helpful to close every program on my laptop and reboot before trying to copy these files onto my hard drive (none of the programs I tried were willing to read off the dvd drive), otherwise it took forever. I downloaded all five of the sequential VOB files (they were named VTS_01_1.VOB etc) onto my hard drive.

I tried bunches of programs to convert them but the one which worked was Format Factory. I converted my files to .avi format (which I knew Movie Maker can read) but it will do all these other conversions too according to the website:

All to MP4/3GP/MPG/AVI/WMV/FLV/SWF.
All to MP3/WMA/AMR/OGG/AAC/WAV.
All to JPG/BMP/PNG/TIF/ICO/GIF/TGA.
Rip DVD to video file , Rip Music CD to audio file.
MP4 files support iPod/iPhone/PSP/BlackBerry format.
Supports RMVB,Watermark, AV Mux.

Then I just imported the .avi files into Windows Movie Maker and started slicing them up. It sounds easy but there were some hair-tearing hours... good luck to you.

ps if you are not careful you'll allow Format Factory to stick the Ask search engine toolbar onto your computer. Then even after you go to the control panel and uninstall it, it will still be there! You have to go into your browser settings (in Chrome, click the wrench icon and then Tools and Settings) to get rid of it.