[ale] DVD ripping

[Brian Pitts]

Scott Castaline wrote:
> I may get into transcoding in the future, for now I don't mind going 
> through the menu systems on the DVD.

If you change your mind, in mplayer you can skip the menus by opening 
tracks directly. I'm pretty sure mplayer will open an iso file.

I had to figure this out because all of the standard linux dvd players 
(ogle, xine, mythtv's internal player) were too slow to decode dvd's on 
my repurposed zapstation [1]. Mplayer could play them smoothly with the 
right options, but by default it seemed to only load the first track on 
the disk. I tried compiling it with libdvdnav support, but I couldn't 
figure out how to navigate the dvd menu from the keyboard. What I can do 
from the keyboard is skip between entries in the playlist, so I wrote 
the following script to run mplayer with a playlist entry for each title 
on the dvd.

#!/bin/sh
TITLECOUNT=`lsdvd /dev/scd0 | grep Title | grep -v Disc |  wc -l`
PLAYLIST=""
OPTIONS="-fs -zoom -cache 8192 -vo xv -vfm ffmpeg -lavdopts lowres=1 
-framedrop"
for i in `seq 1 $TITLECOUNT`
do
	PLAYLIST="$PLAYLIST dvd://$i"
done
mplayer $OPTIONS $PLAYLIST

> I'm thinking of building a library 
> of music and videos and creating a search and play front end, possibly 
> like MythTV but different. Although M$ had already announced after their 
> coffee table pc announcement of launching in the future something 
> exactly along the lines of what I want to do.

Out of curiosity, what might that be? There are a lot 
(https://wiki.ubuntu.com/MediaCenter/StateOfTheArtSpecs) of existing 
linux media center projects. I'm keeping an eye on Elisa, which is very 
reminiscent of Apple's Front Row interface.

-Brian

[1] Currently running Mythbuntu. The processor is reasonably fast, but 
disk and even RAM access is slow, plus X eats a lot of CPU.