On 12 Aug 2009, at 12:05, Neil Bothwick wrote:
On Tue, 11 Aug 2009 19:58:11 +0100, Stroller wrote:
I guess I just prefer this encrypted.dd.iso image because it's a
single file to work with, rather than a directory containing a mess
of .vob files. Or, at least, the mess of .vob files are hidden from
me. ;) I guess I've just gotten used to doing it this way.
If you're only encoding one title from each DVD, you could use
mplayer to
rip the title to a single file.
mplayer dvd://1 -dumpstream -dumpfile somefilm.mpeg
No point though, really, is there? I mean, I'm happy with it this way,
I'm not short of space, and to me that just seems to be complicating
things.
Handbrake looks interesting, I'm trying to rip some DVDs to play
on my
Eee during a long flight next week, but the ebuild from b.g.o fails
during compilation here.
I think I used this one:
http://gentoo-overlays.zugaina.org/voyageur/portage/media-video/handbrake/handbrake-0.9.3.ebuild
I've since grabbed the latest from SVN, which builds with the standard
./configure && make && make install.
However, it did download and compile a bunch of libraries that I
already
have. Programs using their own copies of libraries is a bit Windowsy
for
my liking.
I know. I find it more "Macintoshy" than Windowsy myself, but whatever
- it just feels a little dirty. I can only guess the Handbrake devs
did it this ways because the latest versions of media libs like these
aren't so well tracked by many distros, so this saves them manually
updating from SVN (or are the versions pinned?). Also, I think they
develop for Windows & that HandBrakeCLI will compile & work on that
platform.
I get the impression that Gentoo's devs find it difficult to
reconcile
Handbrake's build system with Portage. ...
I suspect 0.9.4 will have more luck, as it uses a more standard build
system.
I really nope so. If I had more time I might look at the SVN & see if
I could hack an ebuild, but 0.9.3 is working just fine for me right
now. I'm fairly happy to tolerate it having done it's own rude thing
wrt lib downloads, at least since I've installed using an ebuild, so
`emerge -C` should remove all files installed by it, when removal or
upgrading becomes necessary or desirable.
I'm also trying undvd, which seems simplicity itself.
undvd is really nice. There's some stuff the author has got really
right: coloured output, nice display / layout, just the right amount
of options, help display is not too long, split onto two pages
(standard & advanced is accessed with "-z"). To me it seems just right
for casual use at a terminal, like the author has focussed on that,
and it's an aspect which the alternatives neglect to some extent or
another.
Depending on how much time is available to you for ripping, and upon
your optical prescription &/or tolerance for video quality, you
probably want to look at undvd's "-2" argument & its target size
option. I think you can set the bitrate in undvd, but I didn't find it
obvious what bitrate it's using by default - thus it's not obvious
what bitrate to choose in order to improve quality (or by default does
it try to make a file that'll fit on a CD-R? I can't recall). Setting
a target video size is the easy way to improve video quality in undvd
& on a number of movies I found a 1.2gig rip indistinguishable from
the original DVD.
The downside of undvd, as I've said & I'll keep saying, is that the
video files it produces don't play so nice on other platforms. The
author is a bit of a Linux evangelist, and doesn't really care about
that, since mplayer (at least; I don't know about vlc or other Linux
players) is really forgiving, and makes extra efforts to overcome
video files' shortcomings. For me, however, this is just an
insurmountable snag, and TBH I think undvd should neither be in the
tree, nor promoted the way it is on its sourceforge page (he should
admit it's just a personal project that "works for him"). I can't be
the only person who wants to rip movies in Linux to play back on the
Mac or PS3, and if I've wasted this much time on undvd then surely
others will, too.
If you just want the movies to play back on a Linux laptop whilst on a
holiday trip then this probably won't bother you at all, but if you
want an "archive" of your movie collection which you'll keep for
playback into the future then undvd isn't the best ripper. It seems to
me that HandBrakeCLI takes that prize, in the command-line category,
at least.
Stroller.
