On Sun, Oct 30, 2011 at 4:39 AM, Andrey Moshbear <andrey....@gmail.com> wrote:
> On Thu, Oct 27, 2011 at 16:09, Mark Knecht <markkne...@gmail.com> wrote:
>> I'm getting a Kindle Fire in a few days. While I didn't get it
>> specifically to watch movies looking at the specs it does apparently
>> handle mp4 as a video format and they state online that you can watch
>> streaming movies & TV shows from Amazon's servers. I do a lot of blood
>> donations - roughly 20-25 times/year - that take 2-3 hours each so
>> either being able to read or watch a movie would be a pleasant way to
>> pass the time. Being able to hold it comfortably in one hand is
>> important to me.
>>
>> I started looking around in Google for something to encode a few DVDs
>> so that I could see how well it works. A program called handbrake was
>> showing up in a lot of links, but it requires an overlay. While I have
>> no problem adding yet another overlay (which on is best?) I wondered
>> what might be in the normal portage database that others here use for
>> this purpose?
>>
>
> I use vobcopy to rip each title to a vob (instead of VTS_${TITLE}_$n)
> then 2-pass ffmpeg the vob to transcode to mkv.
>
> Makes batch transcoding rather fast and painless.
>
>Thanks. Here's my progress so far using a Casablanca DVD as a test case. Again, my goal by the middle of next month is to run videos on the Kindle Fire. The spec sheets for the Fire says it's supports mp4. I don't see any other obvious video formats. 1) I tried vobcopy. I got 6GB of files. I assumed ffmpeg was the next step but didn't easily Google how to run it in this specific case so I set it aside for the moment. 2) Tried dvd::rip because it was in portage. It got through the rip portion of the job but then apparently couldn't find it's own files to do the encoding. I tried joining the dvd:rip email list but I'm still waiting for the moderator to accept me 3 days later so there's no where appropriate for me to ask questions on using dvd::rip. 3) I tried handbrake which requires using an overlay. 3a) Tried the sabayon overlay but it wants to change too many files on my system so I dropped that. 3b) Tried the multimedia overlay because it had the most up to date version of handbrake. Unfortunately that didn't build 3c) Tried the init6 overlay with provided handbrake-0.9.5 which built correctly and runs fine. Handbrake goes directly from DVD to a reasonably sized (1.3GB) m4v file. That file plays fine in xine and looks very good. Being that the Kindle Fire only has about 6GB available for user content that gives me 4 movies at a time which is fine for me but I suspect I can do better. My issue now (I think) is to learn to use ffmpeg to convert from m4v to mp4. I'd like to see about reducing the file size a bit if possible. At the same time the native resolution of the Fire is 1024x600 so I'm wondering about whether I can make the movies look better by making the mp4 file somehow know about that size. Anyway, I'v made reasonable progress for a few days of sporadic effort. Hopefully I'll be able to make more by Nov. 15th. Cheers, Mark
