After the MiniDV videotape camcorders and before the explosion of hard disk camcorders,
several manufacturers were making these camcorders that would record directly to DVD media. A handful of them recorded to full-size DVD media, but most recorded to a small (~3 inches in diameter) mini-DVD media. One of these discs can hold about 30 minutes of SD (740x480, 30 frames per second) video or about 1.4GB of data.

A couple years ago, I was working on a video editing project and one of my sources was from one of these mini-DVD camcorders. One of the perks of the mini-DVD format is you can throw it right into a DVD player and it plays it, without much grief, like a normal DVD movie. There's even a scene-selection menu that shows you thumbnails of images to select scenes recorded on the DVD.

I think the mini-DVD format was a great idea for people who just want to videotape an event and throw it in the DVD player, but it's not so good for someone who wants to edit the video on the computer. The camcorder manufacturers probably shipped the cameras with some kind of conversion program to extract the video from the discs and convert it into an editable format, but since I didn't own one of these mini-DVD camcorders, I didn't have such software.

A little googling and I found the answer!

Check out this command:

mplayer dvd://1 -dumpstream -dumpfile dvd.vob

This mplayer command may be familiar to those who rip video from DVDs to convert it to an MPEG4 format or something similar.

I can't edit a VOB file, so I needed to convert the VOB into, preferably, an AVI. Most of the AVIs I edit are DV format AVIs that I get off my DV camcorders. I knew if I could get the video on the mini-DVD into that format, I'd be in heaven. I didn't find a direct way to do this, but I did find two more steps that would do it.

ffmpeg -i dvd.vob -target dv dvd.dv
cat dvd.dv | dvgrab -f dv2 -s 0 -stdin

The first command (ffmpeg) converts the VOB into raw DV data. This is data you could stream to a camcorder and store on a tape. It's not in an AVI container, but it's close. The next command (dvgrab) is usually used for capturing video from IEEE 1394 (Firewire) video devices, but being that it has an option (-stdin) for reading data from standard input, we can use it to convert our raw DV data to an AVI.

Voila!