Burning a disc in Ulead VideoStudio 11 Plus

[Phillip]

We recently returned from a trip to mainland China. During our stay we purchased a few DVD's of attractions we saw. They played on my computer but not on my DVD player. They are in 'VOB' format. I purchased a converter program and I converted them into 'mpg' and brought them into Ulead VideoStudio 11 Plus.

When I try to create a disc in Ulead, using 'mpg' format, for viewing on our DVD player, VideoStudio always converts the files back to 'VOB' format.

Is the problem my newness to using this type of software. I reviewed the 'preferences' numerous times and made different selections, but to no avail.

Does this problem have to do with 'Regional Code'? Not sure what that means. Possibly, different parts of the world use different formats for making DVDs so they cannot be copied?

Would appreciate any help possible??? Thanks!!!

[Ken Berry]

Is the problem my newness to using this type of software.

In a word, yes! More to the point, you seem new to the very concept of video editing and burning DVDs...

In more than a word, any video DVD, anywhere in the world, regardless of region and regardless of whether it is in NTSC or PAL countries, follows strict international standards. And for a video DVD, regardless of the original format of your video, it must before the actual burn be converted to a structure using, for the video itself, the extension .vob. A typical video DVD also contains .IFO files (InFOrmation on the structure of the disc) and .BUP files (Back-UP). No ifs, not buts (or should I say, no ifos nor bups?!)

In reality, .vob files are mpeg-2 format but using that .vob extension because they are usually encoded with certain other information, and usually also broken across videos which might have started life as continuous clips. But another part of the DVD standard is that no file on a video DVD can be larger than 1 GB (or 1,048,574 bytes), and hence the breaks. But the IFO files contain the code necessary to ensure that there is no perceptible break when the files are played in their correct sequence on the disc.

The reason the original discs would not play on your stand-alone player, however, was almost undoubtedly because (I am guessing here) the DVDs you bought in China are PAL and your player is only rated to play NTSC. That is not totally unusual. These days, PAL players can just about all play NTSC DVDs, but while increasing numbers of NTSC players can play PAL discs, it is far from universal, especially if your player is more than a couple of years old.

Ironically, particularly in this case, mass produced DVD players from China can play just about anything round and silver you put in them, regardless of where they were made!