[GLLUG] dvd ripper/encoder

[Matt Graham]

On Sunday 08 June 2003 00:34, after a long battle with technology, Dylan 
M. wrote:
> i'm looking for a good way
> to rip my dvd's to put them on a file server.  i've dabbled in
> dvd::rip (front-end for transcode), and lately i've been using
> mencoder, tho i'm not that happy with it.  ideally, i'm looking for
> something that won't compromise the video too much, that will encode
> in an mpeg.

Er.  MPEG-1 is inferior in many ways to other codecs.  Think about 
DiVX;-), since players for that format exist on all platforms now 
thanks to the mplayer dev team.  If you have some sort of ironclad 
requirement that the things be in MPEG-1, make it clear and explain 
why, so people don't give you spurious solutions and bad advice.

> i'd be thrilled with a result of ~2G file, good enough
> not to care that its a rip.  i am impressed w/transcode, but the
> ripper w/dvd::rip doesn't rip all that good.

"Rip" usually refers to the process of catting the MPEG-2 file on the 
DVD into a .vob file on your hard disk.  Are you sure you don't mean 
"transcode doesn't encode my movies well"?  dvd::rip's interface 
provides fewer options than mencoder does, and it is possible to get a 
great deal of control over how the final DiVX;-) looks with mencoder's 
more esoteric options.  Have you Googled for "Linux video encoding 
tutorial"?  Do that; there are some good guides out there.

IME, if you resize the frames to about 3/4 their initial size, then set 
the audio bitrate to 128kbit and the video bitrate to 1300..1500 kbit, 
you'll end up with 2 ~700M DiVX;-) encoded files, practically 
artifact-free, conveniently sized for burning to CD-R for long-term 
archival.  I've done most of my encoding with dvd::rip, but if you want 
to play with mencoder some more, the "dvd2divx.pl" script found in the 
mplayer source distribution gives you a reasonably easy way to do some 
things.  Only hard part with mencoder is figuring out the crop/resize 
parameters (which is really easy with transcode!).  I fiddled with this 
script a bit, inserting a few more options and tweaking its default 
mencoder parameters; can post a URL to it if there's interest.

-- 
   We're standing there pounding a dead parrot on the counter, and the
   management response is to frantically swap in new counters to see if
   that fixes the problem.           --Peter Gutmann, ASR 6/18/1998
There is no Darkness in Eternity/But only Light too dim for us to see