What is a VOB file?
DVD video container with multiple streams
VOB files are ‘video object’ files. VOBs are standardized container files that store multiple media formats within it. That means that a VOB file usually contains video streams, audio streams, and text metadata. The most common use of a VOB file is for DVD media. A typical VOB file will contain audio, video, subtitle, menu, and DVD content information. The file data is then multiplexed together into a streaming format.
Common uses for VOB files
- DVD playback
- DVD backups
- Movie archives
- DVD rips
- DVD VIDEO_TS folders
Who works with VOB files?
Archivists and librarians digitizing DVD-era collections work with VOB files daily, as do legal and law-enforcement teams who receive depositions, interviews, or surveillance footage delivered on disc. Documentary editors, broadcasters, and families preserving home-movie DVDs also encounter VOBs when pulling content off physical media.
VOB vs MPG: which should you use?
A VOB file is a DVD-specific version of the MPEG-2 program stream used by MPG files: it carries the same MPEG-2 video and audio but adds subtitle (subpicture) streams, menu data, and DVD navigation information, and is split into segments of at most 1 GB inside a VIDEO_TS folder. Plain MPG files omit the DVD-specific streams, so they play in a wider range of software without special handling. Choose VOB when you need to preserve the full DVD structure, and MPG when you just need a portable MPEG-2 video stream.
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