I’ve known that it somehow HAD to be possible to rip a DVD and play the ripped files directly on a PS3 without having to transcode anything. My reasoning was that because a PS3 can easily play a DVD when playing the VOB files from the VIDEO_TS folder on a DVD disc, why couldn’t it do it from files on disk (or over the LAN).

I’ve discovered a solution that was actually quite a bit easier than I initially expected.

2 separate tools are needed – the unix cat command and tsMuxeR.

Simply browse the VIDEO_TS folder on your hard drive and find the set of VOB files that make up the main title.

Concatenate them together (cat VTS_01_0.VOB VTS_01_1.VOB VTS_01_2.VOB output.vob)

Run this large VOB file through tsMuxeR (which is currently not working on Snow Leopard, so I’m running it in a VM under Windows 7 and it still flies!)

The end result is an m2ts file that takes about 5 minutes from start to finish to create.