[GLLUG] dvd ripper/encoder

[Dylan M.]

Matt Graham wrote:

>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.
>  
>
hrm, i have been encoding in divx, but perhaps i was under the faulty 
opinion that you could encode in divx and end up in an mpg format (which 
seems to work better for editting or the off-chance i'd want to burn it 
back to dvd)

>  
>
>>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.
>
i did mean i had a problem ripping w/ dvd::rip.  on all but one (of 
probably 15) dvd's i've tried, i get an error scanning, so it doesn't 
create a valid *.nav.log file for the chapter.  i get an error when 
scanning saying it can't handle the encryption, and then ofcourse the 
rip stops short b/c all the frames aren't listed in the .nav.log file.  
i've never had any problem PLAYING movies in mplayer (and only Legend Of 
Drunken Master won't rip w/mencode (tried w/2 different disks))  but i 
think that it may have to do with my sloppy installation of libdvdread 
(tho i'm not sure that that is the case now, when i decided to switch 
over to mencode from transcode, it wouldn't accept sym-links to 
libdvdread, and i had to put in a copy, which i ofcourse get errors for 
everytime i boot up.)

>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.
>
>  
>
i've been using a different Perl frontend to mencode: AcidRip, seems to 
do the job pretty nicely.  tho it seemed that transcode offers a little 
more control, but then again, i'm still new to this whole encoding thing ;)


then again, it could just be that my system is hosed.  you combine 
inexperience with laziness (ie patching instead of fixing), then you can 
even make linux run as stable as windows :P  perhaps i'll just have to 
clean out all that extra crap and start clean.

dylan