[mythtv-users] mythvideo and DVD's

[Brent Borghese]

I have been using mythvideo and mplayer to build my video on demand
server of all my DVD's.

My goal was to have one movie per file of about 1G in size and be able
to play the movie on my mythtv linux box and also be able to play the
movie on a Windows box.

Here is what I same up with:

To start you will need the mpeg4/divx codec from www.divx.com, this will
make the linux mplayer play divx avi files, and if you want to also play
the files in windows the divx codes will make Windows media player and
Real player play the files.

In mpeg4/divx format you can get all most DVD quality of a move in about
1.3G file(1.4G = 116 minutes)

Using mencoder from the mplayer project you can rip and re-encode your
DVD's to a single AVI file:

mencoder -dvd 1 -alang en -oac mp3lame -lameopts cbr:preset=192 -ovc
lavc -lavcopts vcodec=mpeg4:vhq:vbitrate=1800 -o "Star Trek -
Nemesis.avi"

The above line will read the first title off of the DVD using the
English sound track and then re-encode the video at 720x480 in mpeg4 @
1800 bits/sec and the audio in MP3 format at a constant bit rate of 192k
bit/sec.

It took me a while to come up with this, if you try using a variable bit
rate with the audio, the video and audio sync get way out of sync.   And
most of the time windows does not know how to play the audio in the AVI
files that mencoder creates.

On a AMD XP 1700+ CPU can re-encode a move in about read time, so a 116
minute movie takes about 116 minutes to re-encode to mpeg4/divx.

Brent