DVD Ripping

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Revision as of 21:20, 29 March 2007 by T0ny (talk | contribs)

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MythDVD serves two roles:

  • Playback of DVDs and VCDs via the internal player or optionally an external player.
  • "Ripping" of DVDs for storage on your Myth box. MythDVD can save the main title from a DVD as an MPEG-4 avi file and place it in your MythVideo collection. Various options are given to allow you to balance space vs quality.


DVD/VCD 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*.

The internal player supports DVD menus, subtitles and alternative audio tracks. It also integrates completely with Myth using the same OSD, remote bindings and playback options. Playback using the internal player is the default.

MythTV has the option of outputting different video resolutions based on the resolution of the video being viewed. Unfortunately, there is no similar option for MythDVD - the GUI resolution will always be used.


Important.png Note: Xine or Ogle are recommended over mplayer due to the fact that they support DVD menus.

DVD Ripping

Ripping of DVDs to storage on your Myth box. MythDVD can save the main title from a DVD as an MPEG-4 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, Suse 10.2, 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


Important.png 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.


Important.png Note: A really, really important thing to get right is to enable DMA on your DVD drive. Without it, MythDVD (or MythVideo as it now is) stutters badly. This is irrespective of the speed of your machine.

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 Requirements

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.

Usage

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 MPEG-2 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.

The import consists of several automated steps:

  1. Copy the VOB video and Auido files to a temporary file (apprx 30Min). For "Pefect" it stops here.
  2. First Pass Transcode of the Video and audio files (approx 1hour per hour of movie)
  3. Second Pass Transcode to reduce the file size even further (approx 1 hour per hour of movie)

If you have specified the quality to be "good", it will call transcode to do the .vob -> .avi with Xvid or DivX.

The transcode time will depend on the speed of your processor (numbers given using AMD XP2800).

Once Transcode has finished you should find the new compressed movie in your Videos directory, which is visible via the Myth Video manger.

Rip/Transcode Options

Select Select this Video file for transcoding. A DVD will typically include multiple video files, eg trailers, directors commentary etc.
Name The title of the DVD RIP
Quality Options available are dependant on the DVD inserted
  • Perfect : Available for all Discs. Makes an exact copy of the MPEG file
  • Excellent : 4:3 and 16:9 non-letterboxed Only. Transcode the MPEG file at a high bitrate. Resultant files size is approx 2GB
  • Good : All Other . Transcode the MPEG file at average bitrate. Resultant file size is approx 800MB
Audio Track Select which of the Audio tracks available on the DVD you want encoded with the video
AC3 Audio Encode the AC3 Dolby digital surround audio track
Subtitles Encode the Subtitiles with the video
View Preview the Movie during Transcode
      • If you want to rip to an ISO file, you will only have to select one title.

This is not clear from the ripper or the online docs, so I am adding this little tip in order to save others some time and hard drive space. ;-) --High Noonan 16:46, 22 March 2007 (UTC)

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