DVD Ripping

MythDVD serves two roles:

• Playback of DVDs and VCDs via the use of an external player such as Xine, Ogle or mplayer. Optionally there is a basic internal DVD player, which can be enabled by setting the 'Player Command' to 'internal' (requires libdvdnav when building). Note: Xine or Ogle are recommended over mplayer due to the fact that they support DVD menus. There's a page on Configuring Xine.

• "Ripping" of DVDs for storage on your Myth box. MythDVD can save the main title from a DVD as an MPEG4 avi file and place it in your MythVideo collection. Various options are given to allow you to balance space vs quality.

DVD Playback

Playback of DVDs via the use of the internal Myth DVD player or DVDs and VCDs via an external player such as Xine, Ogle or mplayer. Note: Xine or Ogle are recommended over mplayer due to the fact that they support DVD menus. The internal Myth player is available from version 0.19 onwards and DVD menu support from 0.20. To enable playback using the internal player, simply set the 'Player Command' in the MythDVD settings to 'internal'.

DVD Ripping

Ripping of DVDs for storage on your Myth box. MythDVD can save the main title from a DVD as an MPEG4 avi file and place it in your MythVideo collection. Various options are given to allow you to balance space vs quality.

DVD Drive Setup

Generally MythDVD looks for the DVD drive as /dev/dvd. If you are using Fedora Core, and some other distributions, this is not created by default when a DVD drive is detected. Its normally easily created with a symbolic link to the /dev/cdrom:

ln -s /dev/cdrom /dev/dvd

Note: On systems with more than one CD drives you might need to use /dev/cdrom1, /dev/cdrom2 etc...

Once you have the /dev/dvd created you should test the DVD playback functionality. This will confirm the DVD drive is setup as required.

DVD Rip Settings

When the DVD drive is working as described above, setup the MythDVD ripping settings. These are located here in the default menu structure (0.18):

MythTV → Utilities/Setup → Setup → Media Settings → DVD Settings → Rip Settings

The default settings work fine for most situation. The location for the ripped DVDs might need to be adjusted, normally you want the path to be access from MythVideo for playback.

Transcode the DVD

To transcode the DVD you need the MTD ( Myth Transcoding Daemon ) running. Transcoding provides the ability to compress the DVD further and keep near to original quality.

If you have your system set up to run mythfrontend upon boot, a good way to start mtd is to do so in the same place that you autostart other programs when the myth user logs in.

On Fedora Core using ATrpms mythtv-suite, you can easily setup the MTD to load at startup with the following:

echo "/usr/bin/mtd --daemon" >> /etc/rc.d/rc.local

On other distributions it might be required to run 'which mtd' to find the correct path.

Rip it

You are now ready to RIP the DVD, from the MythTV main menu go to the Optical Disk menu ( Optical Disks -> Import DVD ). You should see a list of available VOBs to RIP from the DVD.

You should select the VOBs you wish to transcode, generally the largest VOB is the movie and the smaller ones are extras. It's a good idea to use the View feature to ensure you're ripping the audio and video track you really mean to and not, for instance, the director/cast commentary.

You can also adjust the quality, which will automatically setup the transcoding profile. Perfect Quality saves the MPEG2 stream intact and is (by far) the fastest option, but also consumes the most disk space. The other options create smaller files, but use more CPU and provide less quality.

When you are ready to begin transcoding use the '0' key on the remote or the keyboard to start the transcoding process.