Be gentle I'm new to this

So I bought a DVD recorder to transfer some VHS tapes. So far so good. Burned the DVD - works on dvd player BUT I would like to view on my pda or on a laptop w/o a dvd player (eg transfer files to hard drive)but with a dvd player software (eg nero). The format that the dvd recorder writes is not readable by either the computer or pda - it is a .vob format.

Is there a way to change this to mpeg or avi or.......