www.makemkv.com

I ripped some of my TV series DVDs to an external USB HDD with the intent of playing them on my PS4. I was stupid and neglected to check what formats/containers it supports. I knew it played MKV, but I didn't know that it will only play H264 video in an MKV container, not MPEG2. I'm able to use FFMpeg to change the container to VOB, but I can't figure out if I can preserve the chapter information from the MKV. Is there a way to do this?

If you're going to use ffmpeg, why not encode it to h264 instead?

I know transcoding to H264 would probably incur only a small quality hit, but I'd rather keep the original video stream without re-encoding. Anyway, I found out that none of the containers that the PS4 will play support chapters besides MKV (and it won't play MKV unless the video stream is H264). That's not a deal breaker. I know using a media server like Plex would be a lot easier, but I don't have a dedicated machine to play videos and I don't want to turn on the computer every time I want to watch something.

If I am recalling correctly, VOB files themselves don't have chapter info. That is kept in other files in the VIDEO_TS directory. Did you save the complete backup?

Yeah I still have the original files. As I found out, the only container the PS4 supports that includes chapters in the file itself is MKV, but the MKV must have an H264 video stream. The PS4 Media Player app is very bad anyway. It won't deinterlace anything. Blurays/DVDs are played with a separate player which will deinterlace properly.