[mythtv-users] Ripping DVD's

[Brent]

Yan Seiner wrote:
> Jared Greenwald wrote:
>   
>> On 3/14/07, *Yan Seiner* <yan at seiner.com <mailto:yan at seiner.com>> wrote:
>>
>>
>>     I use mencoder (not myth) to rip DVDs, and I get a full-length DVD
>>     into
>>     about 900 MB - 1.4 GB.  Cartoons take a lot more space than live
>>     action.
>>
>>     I do two-pass encoding, and a single DVD takes about 3-6 hours to
>>     complete both passes.
>>
>>
>> Can you elaborate a little more on this process?  A howto on the wiki 
>> or something?
>>     
>
> Until I get to the wiki, here's a brief synopsis:
>
> 1.  Get and build mplayer/mencoder.  Most likely you will have to build 
> from source to get the latest codecs, etc.
>
> 2.  Install lsdvd.
>
> 3.  run lsdvd to get a listing of the tracks.  At this point, I usually 
> play the longest tracks to see what's on them.  Some DVDs will have two 
> identical tracks, except that one is in 4:3 and the other 16:9.  Or 
> sometimes one will be in French and one in English, or some such 
> nonsense.  Look through the DVD and play any track that looks 
> interesting.  Pay attention to the sound as well; sometimes the primary 
> track is a french or spanish dubbing, or 2 channel stereo.
>
> 4.  run mplayer dvd://[my track] -vf cropdetect ; mplayer will print out 
> its idea of a bounding box so you can trim out the black border.  This 
> can change so make sure you skip ahead far enough to get past the titles 
> and so on.  Read the manpage for mencoder on that as well.
>
> 5.  Now that you have the track and crop info, edit the encode script 
> (read the comments).
<snip>

Have you tried DVDrip?  You might want to check it out as it could help 
with some of this busy work.  I used to use it to rip all of mine and I 
could get all this done and running the encode in about a minute with 
it.  It might be something to look into.

Brent