VOB is a format for DVD files that are usually stored in the VIDEO_TS folder. VOB is based on MPEG-2 and it can contain video, audio, subtitles and other data. Each file should be less than 1 GB to be compatible with all operating systems, otherwise they will not be read.

SPHERE (SPeech HEader Resources) is a file format defined by NIST (National Institute of Standards and Technology) and is used with speech audio. SoX can read these files when they contain μ-law and PCM data. It will ignore any header information that says the data is compressed using shorten compression and will treat the data as either μ-law or PCM. This will allow SoX and the command line shorten program to be run together using pipes to encompasses the data and then pass the result to SoX for processing.