EXCEPT STB recorders mostly use ac3 audio and then you need to do a lot of messing around.
Take my advice STB DVD recorders were NEVER designed so you could edit the video you recorded. By a VHS machine, it's easier to edit and the results will probably be of a higher quality compared to re-encoding mpeg-2 and decoding and encoding lossy ac3.
Oh, and you can easily fit 3 hours onto a VHS tape without dropping quality.

Sorry about the rant and yes STB DVD recorders do have a place in the scheme of things but the public is not being told the truth, these things are being marketed as replacements for VHS machines and they are nothing like them.

Twice now I've been given DVDs from these horrors and both times the users had failed to finalise the DVD so I can do nothing with them, period. Now I'm trying to workout how to finalise a disk from a DVD camera and the client no longer has access to the camera so they cannot even play the little shiny disk.

Had my rant for the day.

Bob.

Bob, I beg to differ about STB DVD recorders. I much prefer it to VHS. With VHS you can't do chapters like with DVD. There is no comparison between DVD's chapter serach vs VHS's FF and RW. VHS tape quality fades with time. DVD doesn't. They claim I can record over my DVD RAM disc 100,00 times. VHS tape you'd be lucky to get 100 record overs. Not to mention the physical storage form factor. You can fit 1000 DVDs in the same space as 5 VHS tapes. If I can get this editing figured out DVD will go up another notch in my book!
I'll try again what the first responder mentioned. I tried that last night, but it didn't work. Are you sure Vegas and even windows XP can handle a 1 gigabyte file??? Maybe I didn't wait long enough for the file to open??? Thanks!

It's going to take a loooong time to load and it is going to be a nightmare to edit with. Due to the frame structure of MPEG-2 files they are not meant for editing. It will most likely really choke up Vegas and possibly even crash it. You'd be better off doing an analog capture of the DVD, you'll get better results.

1GB is nothing to worry about size wise.

farss is right -- a lot of these recorders use oddball gop structures and multiplexing .. using the files on something else is difficult at times ..

this is one case where it may be easier to just play the disk back and capture it in DV ..

Tampa,
Windows of anything in the FAT32 era (Win98) can handle file size of up to 4 G. If you use 2000/XP and use NTFS file systems, file sizes are not limited to 4 G and I've never read any real limit to them at all (whatever the limit is, noone mentions it, so I'll bet it's larger than any current hard drive). Large files are fine except for being quite slow.

Of course some APPLICATIONS can't handle those file size, but Vegas can. However, I'm not sure that Vegas Capture can, because I had a long DV capture truncated at 18 mins or so(about 4 G) by Vegas for no apparent reason. There was no DV camera scene break because it was recorded non-stop from a VHS recording. To be fair, Vegas continued the capture in a new file, and the new file was frame-accurate to the previous one(so they could be joined perfectly on the timeline and reconstructed), but it complicated a few things outside of Vegas.

-Jayson

Thanks for all the replies. However, I'm still looking for an answer to my original post. Are the large files (1 GB) created by a STB DVD recorder just renamed mpeg2s, or are they some basterdized MPEG2 version that vegas can't deal with?

OdielnAz: Have you tried dragging and dropping a xxx.vob file from a DVD to the vegas time line, or are you guesing that it should work?

A VOB is a multiplexed mpeg2 or mpeg1 file.

All DVD movies are stored in on a DVD video disc in so-called VOB files. VOB files usually contain multiplexed Dolby Digital audio and MPEG-2 video. VOB files on a DVD are numbered as follows: vts_XX_y.vob where XX represents the title and Y the part of the title. There can be 99 titles and 10 parts, although vts_XX_0.vob does not contain any video, usually just menu or navigational information. You can find them on a DVD video disc in a subdirectory labelled VIDEO_TS (all upper case).

All VOB files are essentially MPEG2 Program streams with audio, video, sub-picture and navigation data multiplexed. A VOB file is organized as a set of cells; a cell is a basic unit of play data. Each cell consists of a sequence of units called VOBUs. Each VOBU is a sequence of
packs. The first pack in a VOBU is a navigation pack and contains Program Control Information (PCI) packet and Data Search Information (DSI) packet. The remaining packs contain audio,
video and sub-picture data multiplexed together. Each pack has a fixed size of 2048 bytes. A pack typically contains only one data packet and may be stuffed with dummy bytes or a packet
called ‘padding’ bytes/packet to make it a fixed size.
DVD allows easy navigation in its audio and video data. Information for navigation across different VTS is contained in the VMGM. Within a title, the play order of different cells (from one
or more VOBs in the title) is described in a Program Chain (PGC). A PGC is a logical unit to present a part of or the entire Title or Menu. A PGC is further divided into programs. Each program contains integral number of cells. A Title may have one or more PGCs. However, a Title
that has parental guidance levels, will have more than one PGC. Depending on the parental level selected by the DVD disk viewer, the PGCs are selected for being played. PGC contains PGCI
which gives the order of presentation of cells within that PGC.
The information for presentation of a cell, such as the angle information for seamless and nonseamless play and highlight information is contained in the Navigation packs occurring within the
cell.
When playing non-seamlessly, the cells within a logical block are placed contiguously. Therefore, during cell presentation, intermittent blocks may have to be skipped depending on the angle information selected by the DVD disk viewer.
An angle block is a logical block containing cells for different angle presentations. During presentation, not all the cells within the block are played. The different angle cells are of almost
the same play time and since they are placed adjacent to each other, the DVD disk viewer can seamlessly change from one angle to another.
When playing a parental level seamlessly, cells from different VOBs may be interleaved in a logical block. Such a block is called an interleaved block. Each unit of VOB that lies in an interleaved block is called an ILVU of that VOB. This means that the cells in a VOB may not be placed contiguously over the physical address space and may be interleaved with ILVUs from other VOBs.


When you drag a VOB to Vegas - Vegas reconizes the mpeg file (ussually) if it is only one stream and continuous. Some are not and then Vegas will only "see" to the first EOF ..