Re: [gentoo-user] Automation: Ripping DVDs to disk
On Wednesday 09 March 2011 18:27:59 Stroller wrote: I've got a Perl script to wrapper `dvdbackup mkisofs`, reduce typing a little and do some error-checking. It tries to preserve some of the DVD metadata (TITLE c), and you might find it handy if handing off disk-swapping to your teenage progeny. My script is currently too ugly for me to distribute widely - as soon as I finished I realised I want to rewrite it from scratch - but I think it's fairly robust and if you want a copy for your personal use only then email me off-list. In the next version I'd like to remove the unskippable flag from all titles / chapters, as it seems a little daft to have ripped all one's DVDs to a network RAID array, and yet still have to suffer the dumb FBI warnings. All the Windows rippers do this, so I assume it's possible to implement, but I have no idea how difficult. Hi Stroller, I also would like to have a copy of your perl-script for this. It would make my life a lot easier trying to convert my dvd-collection. As for the unskippable flag, I wonder if the other tools rebuild the menu structure and remove it that way. I have in the past played with making dvd- menus myself and it wasn't too hard. (following the howtos) Thanks in advance, Joost
Re: [gentoo-user] Automation: Ripping DVDs to disk
On 16/3/2011, at 12:44pm, Joost Roeleveld wrote: On Wednesday 09 March 2011 18:27:59 Stroller wrote: I've got a Perl script to wrapper `dvdbackup mkisofs`, reduce typing a little and do some error-checking. ... In the next version I'd like to remove the unskippable flag from all titles / chapters, as it seems a little daft to have ripped all one's DVDs to a network RAID array, and yet still have to suffer the dumb FBI warnings. All the Windows rippers do this, so I assume it's possible to implement, but I have no idea how difficult. ... As for the unskippable flag, I wonder if the other tools rebuild the menu structure and remove it that way. I have in the past played with making dvd- menus myself and it wasn't too hard. (following the howtos) That one can make DVD menus with GUI Linux applications indicates that it must be possible to make such changes. I would imagine (or at least hope) that it's not so much a case of rebuilding the menus from scratch, but just as case of flipping a single bit - the equivalent in a binary-file of changing skippable=no to yes in a text file. What programs have you used to make DVD menus in the past? Stroller.
Re: [gentoo-user] Automation: Ripping DVDs to disk
On Wednesday 16 March 2011 13:54:57 Stroller wrote: On 16/3/2011, at 12:44pm, Joost Roeleveld wrote: On Wednesday 09 March 2011 18:27:59 Stroller wrote: I've got a Perl script to wrapper `dvdbackup mkisofs`, reduce typing a little and do some error-checking. ... In the next version I'd like to remove the unskippable flag from all titles / chapters, as it seems a little daft to have ripped all one's DVDs to a network RAID array, and yet still have to suffer the dumb FBI warnings. All the Windows rippers do this, so I assume it's possible to implement, but I have no idea how difficult. ... As for the unskippable flag, I wonder if the other tools rebuild the menu structure and remove it that way. I have in the past played with making dvd- menus myself and it wasn't too hard. (following the howtos) That one can make DVD menus with GUI Linux applications indicates that it must be possible to make such changes. I would imagine (or at least hope) that it's not so much a case of rebuilding the menus from scratch, but just as case of flipping a single bit - the equivalent in a binary-file of changing skippable=no to yes in a text file. What programs have you used to make DVD menus in the past? DVD Author, there are some howto's for it on the web, including on on the gentoo forums: http://forums.gentoo.org/viewtopic.php?t=117709 I don't know how that menu works, but if anyone knows which file contains it, we might be able to edit that bit. If anyone knows how to create the dvd-author xml-config-files from an existing DVD, I'm sure, with some clever scripting, we can amend that particular flag. It is in my todo-list, but it doesn't have a very high priority at the moment. -- Joost
Re: [gentoo-user] Automation: Ripping DVDs to disk
On Wednesday 16 March 2011 15:17:14 Joost Roeleveld wrote: On Wednesday 16 March 2011 13:54:57 Stroller wrote: On 16/3/2011, at 12:44pm, Joost Roeleveld wrote: On Wednesday 09 March 2011 18:27:59 Stroller wrote: I've got a Perl script to wrapper `dvdbackup mkisofs`, reduce typing a little and do some error-checking. ... In the next version I'd like to remove the unskippable flag from all titles / chapters, as it seems a little daft to have ripped all one's DVDs to a network RAID array, and yet still have to suffer the dumb FBI warnings. All the Windows rippers do this, so I assume it's possible to implement, but I have no idea how difficult. ... As for the unskippable flag, I wonder if the other tools rebuild the menu structure and remove it that way. I have in the past played with making dvd- menus myself and it wasn't too hard. (following the howtos) That one can make DVD menus with GUI Linux applications indicates that it must be possible to make such changes. I would imagine (or at least hope) that it's not so much a case of rebuilding the menus from scratch, but just as case of flipping a single bit - the equivalent in a binary-file of changing skippable=no to yes in a text file. What programs have you used to make DVD menus in the past? DVD Author, there are some howto's for it on the web, including on on the gentoo forums: http://forums.gentoo.org/viewtopic.php?t=117709 I don't know how that menu works, but if anyone knows which file contains it, we might be able to edit that bit. If anyone knows how to create the dvd-author xml-config-files from an existing DVD, I'm sure, with some clever scripting, we can amend that particular flag. It is in my todo-list, but it doesn't have a very high priority at the moment. -- Joost Stroller (and others), While having a quick search, I found the following page: http://old.nabble.com/dvdunauthor-xml-file-dump,-then-import-to-dvdauthor-with- errors...-td20324985.html This may be usefull to someone with good script-fu? :) -- Joost
Re: [gentoo-user] Automation: Ripping DVDs to disk
On Wed, Mar 16, 2011 at 7:44 AM, Joost Roeleveld jo...@antarean.org wrote: As for the unskippable flag, I wonder if the other tools rebuild the menu structure and remove it that way. I have in the past played with making dvd- menus myself and it wasn't too hard. (following the howtos) It is the UOP flag (user operation prohibition). Most DVD copier programs who make whole copies of discs (like K9Copy or DVD 9to5 in linux or DVDShrink on Windows) remove this flag and the region restrictions, too. The DVD's author can define actions for every type of button press on the remote control, or prohibit them. Sometimes they work-around the removal of UOPs by defining the keys with invalid actions so even if the prohibition is removed, the key still doesn't work. In that case it's probably more difficult to fix it yourself. A list of the UOP flags is here: http://www.dvd-replica.com/DVD/cmd-7.php
Re: [gentoo-user] Automation: Ripping DVDs to disk
any manager can I unsubscribe from this list? On Fri, Mar 11, 2011 at 20:28, Neil Bothwick n...@digimed.co.uk wrote: On Wed, 9 Mar 2011 23:34:02 +, Stroller wrote: MythTV uses a perl script for the IMDB lookup, you could adapt that to another setup. However, MythTV also handles all the database stuff. A recording is a recording, whether copied from a TV card or a DVD. In referring to MythTV's focus one aspect I had in mind was that, last time I read about it, I think MythTV kept DVD rips in a separate menu hierarchy from TV. So if you want to look for an action movie, and you click on TV and browse through the videos there, you only see the TV recordings; you then have to exit out of TV and choose DVDs before you can browse what action genre DVDs you have stored. It still keeps recordings separate from videos, and probably always will as TV recordings don't have menus, multiple subtitle languages etc. I was looking into using MythTV's DVD ripping and tagging capabilities separately when I discovered that DVD ripping has been removed from the latest release, so the whole discussion is moot. -- Neil Bothwick There's too much blood in my caffeine system. -- Atenciosamente, Gregory Fontenele
Re: [gentoo-user] Automation: Ripping DVDs to disk
On Wed, 9 Mar 2011 23:34:02 +, Stroller wrote: MythTV uses a perl script for the IMDB lookup, you could adapt that to another setup. However, MythTV also handles all the database stuff. A recording is a recording, whether copied from a TV card or a DVD. In referring to MythTV's focus one aspect I had in mind was that, last time I read about it, I think MythTV kept DVD rips in a separate menu hierarchy from TV. So if you want to look for an action movie, and you click on TV and browse through the videos there, you only see the TV recordings; you then have to exit out of TV and choose DVDs before you can browse what action genre DVDs you have stored. It still keeps recordings separate from videos, and probably always will as TV recordings don't have menus, multiple subtitle languages etc. I was looking into using MythTV's DVD ripping and tagging capabilities separately when I discovered that DVD ripping has been removed from the latest release, so the whole discussion is moot. -- Neil Bothwick There's too much blood in my caffeine system. signature.asc Description: PGP signature
Re: [gentoo-user] Automation: Ripping DVDs to disk
On 8/3/2011, at 6:09pm, James wrote: ... I have a large DVD(movie) collection, that I want copied to hard drive(s) and a database set up about the movies. Since disc is cheap ($75/2TB) I'm not even going to fool around with conversion or compression, i.e. MPEG-2 is fine for now, unless the process can be automated I've started this process, and am pretty much happy with my workflow. IMO you're absolutely right not to transcode the movies, if you can avoid it. I've wasted a lot of time trying to do that well - whilst h264 *is* really good, if you look closely picture quality is still not as good as the original and there are several other ways you can trip up when processing an even moderately large collection. DVD is a pretty whacky standard, and I don't believe there are any transcoding tools that will be certain to get the right framerate, aspect ratio (anamorphic picture, cropping c) and stuff like that every time. If you blindly rip anything less than the whole DVD then it's very easy to get the wrong language of audio or miss subtitles on foreign movies. An example of a movie which has caused ripping complications for me is Killing Zoe - it features an American protagonist but is set in Paris. It is a Hollywood movie but there are large sections of French dialogue - the American director probably wanted to give it a European flavour by including so much. The DVD I have of this movie has a forced subtitle only for the French parts - the film was surely subtitled like this during US theatrical release, but I had not seen it for some years when I originally ripped the disk. So thinking that this is an English language DVD of a Hollywood movie I just ripped audio and video exactly as I would have ripped any other US DVD at the time (for hard subtitles this procedure would have, in fact, been perfectly fine). Consequently the subtitles were missing, and I missed loads of context when I watched it because I don't really speak French - it was only 3/4 of the way through that I suddenly realised my mistake and that there's supposed to be subtitles for these sections. Only at that stage of the plot there was simply too much French dialogue I didn't understand. That is an example of one the most user non-optimal possible experiences from poor DVD ripping. The viewer doesn't understand the movie, but when watching it again the surprise of plot elements may be spoiled from having inadvertently watched it in the wrong language in the first place. Dramatic effect is important and, especially since DVDs allow branching (Director's Cut vs Theatrical on the same disk), there probably loads of examples where the DVD does something clever that can't be captured correctly via a conventional rip of title 1 to .mp4. These may seem like unusual cases, but it's the corner cases that get you every time; since I've found at least a couple of them whilst ripping less than 50 disks, there are probably several in any DVD collection. In one scene of the British movie Lock Stock And Two Smoking Barrels characters talk in cockney rhyming slang so impenetrable it's subtitled; I have no idea whether this short set of subtitles is hard or forced on the DVD. Presuming the movie also has English subtitles for the deaf, how does the DVD avoid those clashing? I don't know, but I don't want to have to care, either. One might hypothesise that the same problem might manifest during the Disney movie Wall-E, were the beeping of one of the robots subtitled. Feel free to dismiss this problem because that film doesn't affect me, but I'm sure you'll find a movie that does affect you, after you've ripped it. (I've just reread your original questions, and seeing your mention of asking a teenager to perform the disk-swapping, I now realise that I've probably been preaching to the converted with these last two lengthy paragraphs. However I might as well leave that commentary in the hope it'll benefit someone else some time). It's pretty common now to rip the main title to .mkv file, but I think this is still flawed. The .mkv container allows storage of the original MPEG2 video encode (quick to rip, no loss of quality) and unlike .mp4 (I think) it also permits multiple different audio tracks (director's commentary c) and multiple subtitles. .mkv is pretty widely supported on standalone players (nearly as widely as .mp4 h264/AAC) but you still have the problem I described before that it may default to the wrong language or subs; at least in this case the viewer can select those from the player's menus themselves, but it's not as nice as the original DVD in a conventional player. You may be already past the cockney scene before you realise the subtitles are missing and have to rewind; more likely you'll just not be aware of these subtitles at all, and you'll entirely miss the point of this scene. I'm not aware of any tools which will easily translate from a DVD the settings for
Re: [gentoo-user] Automation: Ripping DVDs to disk
On Wed, 9 Mar 2011 18:27:59 +, Stroller wrote: There are some questions in your original post that I haven't addressed. I don't know that there's any perfect solution in existence for this kind of consumer management of media files. I'm pretty sure MythTV does some clever lookup of metadata at the IMDB and adds cover art and stuff, but MythTV's focus is on TV recording(s), not DVDs; it probably handles DVDs pretty well, has a decent search and stuff, but it's a whole larger proposition than my setup, a lot more work. Besides, you can probably rip DVDs with `dvdbackup mkisofs` and then later worry about databasing (whether by importing them in to MythTV or otherwise). MythTV uses a perl script for the IMDB lookup, you could adapt that to another setup. However, MythTV also handles all the database stuff. A recording is a recording, whether copied from a TV card or a DVD. -- Neil Bothwick God created the world in six days. On the seventh day he also decided to create England... just to try out his Practical Joke Weather Machine. signature.asc Description: PGP signature
Re: [gentoo-user] Automation: Ripping DVDs to disk
On 9/3/2011, at 10:37pm, Neil Bothwick wrote: On Wed, 9 Mar 2011 18:27:59 +, Stroller wrote: ... I'm pretty sure MythTV does some clever lookup of metadata at the IMDB and adds cover art and stuff, but MythTV's focus is on TV recording(s), not DVDs; it probably handles DVDs pretty well, has a decent search and stuff, but it's a whole larger proposition than my setup, a lot more work. ... MythTV uses a perl script for the IMDB lookup, you could adapt that to another setup. However, MythTV also handles all the database stuff. A recording is a recording, whether copied from a TV card or a DVD. In referring to MythTV's focus one aspect I had in mind was that, last time I read about it, I think MythTV kept DVD rips in a separate menu hierarchy from TV. So if you want to look for an action movie, and you click on TV and browse through the videos there, you only see the TV recordings; you then have to exit out of TV and choose DVDs before you can browse what action genre DVDs you have stored. This may well have changed - they may well have unified that in the last 2 or 3 years - however MythTV is still quite a big undertaking. I think you'd want to add in recording of TV to justify MythTV, and WAF isn't instantaneous. MythTV is, by all accounts, absolutely gorgeous. I think it's probably the most ideal home media centre option, but it's a heck of a lot more complicated than whacking a bunch of files on a network share. Thus I have some reservations about utilising MythTV's IMBD Perl script as it surely populates its results to the MythTV MySQL DB. How to display the results? YAMJ and similar might be worth a look because they do the same thing but create pretty designed-for-TV HTML pages with links to the media files. OP might also investigate XBMC. Stroller.
Re: [gentoo-user] Automation: Ripping DVDs to disk
James, It sounds like you want a complete solution for your multimedia, might I suggest something like xbmc or boxee? They're both solid platforms, unfortunately I cannot suggest a script for automating the disk ripping/conversion process. -Fernando On Mar 8, 2011 11:04 AM, James wirel...@tampabay.rr.com wrote: Hello, I have a large DVD(movie) collection, that I want copied to hard drive(s) and a database set up about the movies. Since disc is cheap ($75/2TB) I'm not even going to fool around with conversion or compression, i.e. MPEG-2 is fine for now, unless the process can be automated (see schema below). Naturally being able to store video in different formats would be a big plus. I'm very flexible on the DB so any software package that already exists in a (gui) tool form, so that I can set it up with simple instructions for an adolescent to: load the dvd execute the script or simple procedure wait until dvd movie is stored on disk then swap out for another DVD... rinse and repeat 500+ times What software exists, or what software would be easy to script up such an endeavor? Tagging movies by rating, genre, year, etc would be a bonus. Hopefully, playing movies after this will be a gui experience; so I can turn the kids and less astute friends loose in a multimedia room where the computer is hooked to a large screen LED device. Later on audio (music) tracks will be added to the menu or system, which hopefully supports a wide range of audio files. Lots of pieces exist in software, but, I'm looking for recommendations on a complete system, that is rather straight forward to install new movies (and audio) and then play them via an easy to use interface, seemlessly. Any comments or suggestions are most welcome. James
Re: [gentoo-user] Automation: Ripping DVDs to disk
On Tue, Mar 8, 2011 at 12:09 PM, James wirel...@tampabay.rr.com wrote: Hello, I have a large DVD(movie) collection, that I want copied to hard drive(s) and a database set up about the movies. Since disc is cheap ($75/2TB) I'm not even going to fool around with conversion or compression, i.e. MPEG-2 is fine for now, unless the process can be automated (see schema below). Naturally being able to store video in different formats would be a big plus. I'm very flexible on the DB so any software package that already exists in a (gui) tool form, so that I can set it up with simple instructions for an adolescent to: load the dvd execute the script or simple procedure wait until dvd movie is stored on disk then swap out for another DVD... rinse and repeat 500+ times What software exists, or what software would be easy to script up such an endeavor? Basically all of the GUI DVD-ripping/recoding software are just shells to run the commandline tools like transcode, ffmpeg, mencoder etc. If you find a GUI tool to do as you wish, it should be trivial to look in its logs and see exactly which commands it ran and then put that into a shell script for repeated usage. Ripping the original DVD contents is the easy part (just use vobcopy), converting it to any other format can be more tricky because you get problems like audio and video being out of sync that sometimes can't be fixed without manual tuning.
Re: [gentoo-user] Automation: Ripping DVDs to disk
From what I understand, you want to automate a ripping process. Ripping is the easy part since you don't want to bother with encoding. In my opinion, you should had a udev line that fire up a mencoder/transcode/vlc/vobcopy/your favourite encoder/copier session, clean the swap and then eject the CD. The udev manpage is quite clear on the subject, examples are all around the net. Cheers. -- Vincent-Xavier JUMEL GPG Id: 0x2E14CE70 http://thetys-retz.net Rejoignez les 5336 adhérents de l'April http://www.april.org/adherer Parinux, logiciel libre à Paris : http://www.parinux.org
Re: [gentoo-user] Automation: Ripping DVDs to disk
On Tue, 8 Mar 2011 11:25:33 -0800, Fernando Freire wrote: It sounds like you want a complete solution for your multimedia, might I suggest something like xbmc or boxee? They're both solid platforms, unfortunately I cannot suggest a script for automating the disk ripping/conversion process. MythTV has a plugin to rip DVDs to disk, and MythVideo can look up information on IMDB and add it to the film's metadata. -- Neil Bothwick Quick!! Act as if nothing has happened! signature.asc Description: PGP signature
