crash while converting video (VOB to mp4)

[nikorai]

Hello,

I am trying to convert some DVDs to mp4 or avi format to watch them on a TV that can read USB keys.
Anway, I tell VLC to open the disk, select the begining of the movie (3:0 in my case), select the audio and subtitle I want, then select convert, choose the format, and launch the conversion.
It starts well, VLC creates the movie.mp4 file I wanted and smoothly increments it up to 981 MB (less than what I expected for 102 minutes @1200kbps + audio, but I could be wrong) in about an hour and a half, which is what I expected from my comp to finish the job (intel core i3@2.9 GHz, 4 cores but VLC was only using 25% CPU).
After that, the size of the file stopped growing, and VLC doesn't display any more what it's doing, but starts using more and more CPU and memory. After letting it all night, it was using 99% CPU, effectively crashing the comp. After restarting the comp, the resulting file is not readable by any player.
What could have possibly gone wrong?

I'm using VLC 1.0.5 on Windows 7 home. The VOB files I was trying to convert can be read without problem by VLC.

edit: To simplify the problem, I tried with one VOB file of another film that has no subtitles and only one audio (if there is only 1 audio, is it number 0 or 1? The default is -1...) and tried different formats. I don't understand what is encapsulation but anyway I tried all the available formats: VLC doesn't crash but the output is not readable at all by the other players, and VLC itself shows a mess: A couple second of the video, then either nothing or ugly little squares everywhere, and much shorter than the total length of the original VOB file.