Here’s a little little-known trick I learned recently about the cat command on MacOS.

The cat command joins (or more precisely, concatenates) files. Even though there is little documentation out there exactly how many file types the cat command supports, luckily for anyone working with DVD rips, VOB files are on that hard-to-find list.

The command joins the files end-to-end and like .txt, the .vob extension is concatenatable.

Here’s how you do it:

First open Terminal and cd into the directory with the VOB files.

Then run this command, replacing the placeholder file names I used here with the ones that interest you. The order of the files is the order they will be joined together:

cat VTS_1.vob VTS_2.vob VTS_3.vob > VTS_all.vob

If there are many files, but they are numbered, you’re in luck, just run this instead where the * replaces the numbers:

cat VTS_*.vob > VTS_all.vob

The process takes a few seconds. Of course, if you are already using Handbrake, you can just combine and encode VOB files into format of your choice, but this takes much longer.