A friend of mine gave me some mini DVDs to import. My Mac can usually just import DVDs directly into iMovie. However it has a slot loading drive that cannot read mini CD/DVDs. My PC has a tray drive that can read them. However, for some reason iMovie cannot ingest the .vob files directly.
After some experimentation I found two approaches to get around this limitation.
One was to copy the Video_ts folder onto a USB drive on the PC and then plug it into the Mac with iMovie running. iMovie recognized it as DVD and offered to import it.
Second was to copy Video_ts from the PC to my Mac over the network. Then I used Disk Utility to create an empty disk image, copied Video_ts to it, unmounted it, fired up iMovie and remounted it. Again iMovie recognized it as a DVD and imported the video.
Interestingly, the second method was faster due to the slowness of writing to USB flash drives.
I still don’t understand why iMovie cannot just accept .VOB files or a DVD folder structure directly but it’s not too difficult of a work-around.
