.iso vs .vob: Advantages?

[fazzaz31]

HI!

I've seen it said on other boards that rendering a rip into an .iso is preferable to .vob. Is there any truth to that, and if so, why?

My apologies if this has been answered before, but I can't get the search engine to understand my question. If it has been answered, please point me to the appropriate thread.

Thanks for all your hard work, everybody.

[Guest]

It depends on what your goals are. If you may want to easily recreate the DVD in the future, it's very easy to burn an ISO to a blank disk. Also, it keeps everything in one file. On the other hand, if you are just going to encode to a different format, most applications won't take ISOs directly; you'd have to mount them with Daemon Tools (or equivalent). So there's no one answer to your question.

[Sion]

HI!

I've seen it said on other boards that rendering a rip into an .iso is preferable to .vob. Is there any truth to that, and if so, why?

My apologies if this has been answered before, but I can't get the search engine to understand my question. If it has been answered, please point me to the appropriate thread.

Thanks for all your hard work, everybody.

As neuron2 pointed out, it depends on what you want. However, an .iso is a really handy, tidy file to have in your archive, and with Daemontools, it's really very easy to access the files within, as if you had inserted the actual DVD to a drive. So if you have Daemontools there's no reason not to rip to an .iso (IMO).

[fazzaz31]

In fact, that helps me a great deal in making decisions about what software to leave on my hard drive. It does help that the cost of HDDs has come way down. I just upgraded to 2 drives for a total of 450GB for about $95!

Before my upgrade, I found myself loading more and more encoding software on my machine, making for more options in decoding which led to questions about how to decode/shrink/recode, etc, which of course led to many headaches and visits to this forum for help.

Back when I first started backing up discs, there was actually the cost question of VCDs vs. DVD price point break - now I can buy quality DVD blanks for roughly the same price I used to pay for blank CDs.

So for me, presently, I very seldom recode to DivX, for instance, and just go straight to DVD5 format, but kept the multiple .vob scheme. Now I see that I can encode to a single big .vob, or go with an .iso using ImgBurn to park the backup until I get around to burning the DVD.

Like Thoreau said, "Simplify; simplify."

DVDShrink still rules!