Hi, A lot of problems that I ever had while mencoding was with vobfiles that were ripped with separate software... especially NTSC vobs... Most of problems disapeared when using only mplayer/mencoder. I disagree it's a good idea (especially on Unixes, and not only with encoding) to mix software. I dont believe too much in standards or compatibility ;) The less I must use the better. ciao DS
vobcopy is able to mirror the complete DVD including IFOs and such in an easy manner (simply "vobcopy -m"). The resulting directory is fully compatible with mplayer/mencoder/transcode and every other application that uses libdvdread (or libmpdvdkit2).
Here again the Unix way of doing things (having several small applications that are combined in order to achieve the wanted results) is the better approach.
But if you only need the VOBs then simply go ahead and use mplayer.
(I'm not voting against mplayer here, I'm voting for vobcopy.)