[MPlayer-users] Can I get a few tips on DVD ripping?

Discussion:

Rui Correia

2017-09-08 11:40:35 UTC

Hello,
I have quite a few legally owned Disney DVD's that I would like to rip so
that my daughter can watch them on her tablet and avoid scratching the DVD
discs. If I wanted anything to do with piracy I would download the torrent
or whatever. ;-)
My NAS runs Linux Debian (OpenMediaVault) and it has a DVD recorder on it
that I would like to use for ripping. Being a NAS, it doesn't have a GUI
(X11/Wayland) so I have to try and achieve this all on the CLI. Hence why I
am trying Mplayer for this task.
I'm only interested in the main movie, with two audio languages (my native
and English) and my native language subtitles for when watching it in
English audio. Also I'd like to retain chapter timecodes and to
containerize inside a MP4/MKV file that will be shared on the LAN through
the NAS.

From what I understand, I can use MPlayer for most of it.
I've taken note of a few MPlayer commands that I found to grab stuff that I
will be needing.

For getting information about the audio track, subtitle tracks and chapters:
$ mplayer dvdnav://1 -identify -dvd-device ~/name_of_movie.iso

For ripping the video:
$ mplayer dvdnav://1 -dumpvideo -dumpfile name_of_movie.m2v -dvd-device
~/name_of_movie.iso

For ripping the audio track 128:
$ mplayer dvdnav://1 -dumpaudio -aid 128 -dumpfile name_of_movie.ac3
-dvd-device ~/name_of_movie.iso

My questions:
- Are the above the best options getting info, ripping video and ripping
audio?
- How can I dump subtitles?

Thanks in advance,

Cheers

Paolo Bolzoni

2017-09-08 13:03:25 UTC

Permalink

Post by Rui Correia
Hello,
I have quite a few legally owned Disney DVD's that I would like to rip so
that my daughter can watch them on her tablet and avoid scratching the DVD
discs. If I wanted anything to do with piracy I would download the torrent
or whatever. ;-)
My NAS runs Linux Debian (OpenMediaVault) and it has a DVD recorder on it
that I would like to use for ripping. Being a NAS, it doesn't have a GUI
(X11/Wayland) so I have to try and achieve this all on the CLI. Hence why I
am trying Mplayer for this task.
I'm only interested in the main movie, with two audio languages (my native
and English) and my native language subtitles for when watching it in
English audio. Also I'd like to retain chapter timecodes and to
containerize inside a MP4/MKV file that will be shared on the LAN through
the NAS.
From what I understand, I can use MPlayer for most of it.
I've taken note of a few MPlayer commands that I found to grab stuff that I
will be needing.
$ mplayer dvdnav://1 -identify -dvd-device ~/name_of_movie.iso
$ mplayer dvdnav://1 -dumpvideo -dumpfile name_of_movie.m2v -dvd-device
~/name_of_movie.iso
$ mplayer dvdnav://1 -dumpaudio -aid 128 -dumpfile name_of_movie.ac3
-dvd-device ~/name_of_movie.iso
- Are the above the best options getting info, ripping video and ripping
audio?
- How can I dump subtitles?
Thanks in advance,
Cheers

Since you have an .iso file, I can tell you _already_ ripped the
movie. What exactly are you tring to achieve?
You just want to extract the mpeg stream?

About your subtitles question, I am not sure you can use mplayer for
that task. But, you can use transcode.

Let /dev/sr0 be the DVD reader and let 0 be the subtitle id you can to
rip you can use:

$ tccat -i /dev/sr0 -T 1,-1 | tcextract -x ps1 -t vob -a $((0x20 +
0)) > subs-en

and subs-en will contain the raw subtitle stream.
If the id is not 0, just put the correct figure instead of the last
zero. For example for the fourth use $((0x20 + 4)).

There are more ideas and details in this page:
https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Convert_any_Movie_to_DVD_Video#Subtitles_from_another_DVD_video

Rui Correia

2017-09-09 17:04:03 UTC

Permalink

Post by Rui Correia

Post by Rui Correia
Hello,
I have quite a few legally owned Disney DVD's that I would like to rip so
that my daughter can watch them on her tablet and avoid scratching the

DVD

Post by Rui Correia
discs. If I wanted anything to do with piracy I would download the

torrent

Post by Rui Correia
or whatever. ;-)
My NAS runs Linux Debian (OpenMediaVault) and it has a DVD recorder on it
that I would like to use for ripping. Being a NAS, it doesn't have a GUI
(X11/Wayland) so I have to try and achieve this all on the CLI. Hence

why I

Post by Rui Correia
am trying Mplayer for this task.
I'm only interested in the main movie, with two audio languages (my

native

Post by Rui Correia
and English) and my native language subtitles for when watching it in
English audio. Also I'd like to retain chapter timecodes and to
containerize inside a MP4/MKV file that will be shared on the LAN through
the NAS.
From what I understand, I can use MPlayer for most of it.
I've taken note of a few MPlayer commands that I found to grab stuff

that I

Post by Rui Correia
will be needing.
For getting information about the audio track, subtitle tracks and
$ mplayer dvdnav://1 -identify -dvd-device ~/name_of_movie.iso
$ mplayer dvdnav://1 -dumpvideo -dumpfile name_of_movie.m2v -dvd-device
~/name_of_movie.iso
$ mplayer dvdnav://1 -dumpaudio -aid 128 -dumpfile name_of_movie.ac3
-dvd-device ~/name_of_movie.iso
- Are the above the best options getting info, ripping video and ripping
audio?
- How can I dump subtitles?
Thanks in advance,
Cheers

Since you have an .iso file, I can tell you _already_ ripped the
movie. What exactly are you tring to achieve?
You just want to extract the mpeg stream?
Hi Paolo,

In fact I called that file an *.iso but I don't exactly know what it is.
I was trying to get rid of the errors/bad sectors that ARccOS adds to the
DVD so Icreated that file with 'ddrescue' like this:
$ ddrescue -b 2048 -n /dev/sr0 ~/dvdrips/rango.iso ~/logfile.txt
You can even check the message I posted on Reddit
https://www.reddit.com/r/Pirate/comments/6vtfe1/linux_cli_ripping_dvds/
This saved me from the reading errors I was getting without (at least
apparently) sacrificing any good data on the DVD.

Post by Rui Correia
About your subtitles question, I am not sure you can use mplayer for
that task. But, you can use transcode.

Cool, I had already bumped into trancode

Let /dev/sr0 be the DVD reader and let 0 be the subtitle id you can to

Post by Rui Correia
$ tccat -i /dev/sr0 -T 1,-1 | tcextract -x ps1 -t vob -a $((0x20 +
0)) > subs-en
and subs-en will contain the raw subtitle stream.
If the id is not 0, just put the correct figure instead of the last
zero. For example for the fourth use $((0x20 + 4)).

So this would work for the subs...
While I am at it, would it make more sense to just use tccat/tcextract for
everything?
I took a look at http://howto-pages.org/dvdbackup/ and found these:
$ tccat -i /dvd -T 1,-1 > movie_name.vob (to extract the VOB)
$ tcextract -i movie_name.vob -t vob -x mpeg2 > movie_name.m2v (to
extract the M2V)
$ tcextract -i movie_name.vob -t vob -x ac3 -a 0 > monvie_name.ac3 (to
extract the AC3)
$ tcextract -i movie_name.vob -t vob -x ps1 -a 43 > subtitles.ps1 (to
extract SUBs)
$ tcprobe -i /dev/sr0 -T 1 (to get chapters' timecodes)

On paper it looks great but in fact it didn't work on my tests.
Apparently the extracted VOB was fine but the M2V and AC3 extracted from it
only have half of the movie. And I don't know if the project is still being
maintained. Their webpage gives me an error. Their ArchLinux package seems
to be updated frequently but it might just be due to repackaging
cosmetics...

Post by Rui Correia
https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Convert_any_Movie_
to_DVD_Video#Subtitles_from_another_DVD_video

I will certainly take a look at their wiki which is one of the best
internet source of info on linux/opensource.

_______________________________________________

Post by Rui Correia
MPlayer-users mailing list
https://lists.mplayerhq.hu/mailman/listinfo/mplayer-users

Thanks a lot for your reply.
I hope this reply of mine is ok in terms of netiquette. Not
used/familiarized with mailing lists through Gmail web client.

Regards,

Rui Correia

Miriam English

2017-09-08 13:18:35 UTC

Permalink

Hi Rui,

I always rip my DVDs to my computer as soon as I buy them. The plastic
they make DVDs out of is so easily scratched I like to play them just
the one time, in ripping them to the computer. Then I put them away in
my DVD case to be taken out again only if the hard drive gets damaged
and my ripped video corrupted.

You don't need dvdnav:// as that's used for showing the DVD menus.
Simply dvd:// is sufficient. Also the video will rip as a vob file, not
as an iso file.

If the track I want is track 2 then I use:
mplayer dvd://2 -dumpstream -dumpfile videoname.vob

I used to use mencoder (part of the mplayer package) to encode videos,
but now I prefer ffmpeg. Here is the way I used to encode a video using
mencoder.

Originally I used to use mplayer to find the width and height of the video

mplayer "$F_NAME.vob" -benchmark -nosound -vo null -endpos 1

but I ended up writing a script that extracted the width and height
automatically for me and inserted those values into the mencoder command:

width=`mplayer "$1.vob" -benchmark -nosound -vo null -endpos 1
2>/dev/null | grep '=>' | cut -d' ' -f5 | cut -dx -f1 | tail -n1`
height=`mplayer "$1.vob" -benchmark -nosound -vo null -endpos 1
2>/dev/null | grep '=>' | cut -d' ' -f5 | cut -dx -f2 | tail -n1`
mencoder "$1.vob" -ovc lavc -lavcopts
vcodec=mpeg4:vbitrate=$bitrate:v4mv:mbd=2:trell -vf
scale=$width:$height,hqdn3d=2:1:2 -aid $audio -nosub -audio-delay -0.2
-oac mp3lame -lameopts vbr=3 -o "$1.avi"

For $bitrate I used 1600 for most videos, but 1800 or 2000 for fast
action. I always meant to get around to learning how to do two-pass
encodings so that mplayer would work out the optimum bitrates, but I
never seemed to have enough time.
Of course $audio was usually 128, though many times would be a different
value.
I found that my videos often had a slight sound mismatch so added
-audio-delay -0.2 to fix that.

Once the video is ripped it contains all the audio tracks associated
with it, so if you want to extract that (perhaps as a commentary track)
then you could get it from the vob file. No need to fetch it off the DVD
again.

If the audio ID is 128:

mplayer "videoname.vob" -aid 128 -ao pcm:file="videoname.wav" -vc null
-vo null

You could then convert it to mp3 using lame:

lame --vbr-new -V 3 "videoname.wav" "videoname.mp3"

You could then play the video with the separate commentary audio file:

mplayer "videoname.avi" -audiofile "videoname.mp3" -msglevel all=-1

(The -msglevel all=-1 just suppresses error messages.)

One of the reasons I now use ffmpeg is that I can easily encode a video
with multiple soundtracks in the one file. That's probably possible with
mencoder, but I never learned how.

Subtitles are a little trickier. I only know of a way to use mencoder to
rip them. If the subtitle you want to rip is subtitle (sid) 0, which is
usually the English soundtrack, and the dvd title is title 1:

mencoder dvd://1 -ovc copy -oac copy -vobsubout "videoname"
-vobsuboutindex 0 -sid 0 -nosound -o /dev/null -vf harddup

I can't remember why I added the filter -vf harddup

A quick way to find out important info about a video file is to put this
in a script:

mplayer "$1" -v -ao null -vo null -frames 0 2>/dev/null | grep
"audio codec:"
mplayer "$1" -v -ao null -vo null -frames 0 2>/dev/null | grep "VIDEO:"
mplayer "$1" -benchmark -nosound -vo null -endpos 1 2>/dev/null |
grep "=>"
mplayer "$1" -v -ao null -vo null -frames 0 2>/dev/null | grep "==>"
echo

Where $1 is the name of the video file passed to the script .

You can convert the titles to the much better (in my opinion) format
.srt subtitles using vobsub2srt, which you can download from
https://github.com/ruediger/VobSub2SRT
It uses the free, excellent OCR (optical character recognition) program
"tesseract" to go through the subtitles and write them as text along
with timing info to a .srt file. Unfortunately, even though tesseract is
getting better and better it still makes a lot of dumb errors on the
subtitles. I find it's much easier and often better to go to one of the
subtitle archives on the net, such as http://subscene.com/ and search
for the DVD I've bought. This is particularly useful if the DVD doesn't
have subtitles. As I'm getting very deaf I find I can no longer watch
movies without subtitles.

I hope this helps.

- Miriam

--
There are two wolves and they're always fighting.
One is darkness and despair. The other is light and hope.
Which wolf wins?
Whichever one you feed.
-- Casey in Brad Bird's movie "Tomorrowland"

Rui Correia

2017-09-09 17:21:07 UTC

Permalink

I've been failing to do that, hence why I already have a couple of "broken"
DVD's. They still play but they have a lot of skipping. They skip 3 or 4
minutes of playtime due to scratches.
Not a big drama, they were cheap but it's kinda dumb to allow that to
happen and then having to buy a new DVD from the bestbuy. I teach my
daughter to take care of her stuff, and I know she's careful but once in a
while "accidents" happen and a DVD ends up on the floor under people's
shoes...

You don't need dvdnav:// as that's used for showing the DVD menus. Simply

Post by Miriam English
dvd:// is sufficient. Also the video will rip as a vob file, not as an iso
file.
I was trying to find out the right Title with the Main Movie hence why I

was using dvdnav. On the remaining ripping commands I forgot to move to dvd
instead.

Post by Miriam English
mplayer dvd://2 -dumpstream -dumpfile videoname.vob
And by track I would assume it is the same as Title?

Interesting. The result is a VOB, not an M2V? Wow.

Post by Miriam English
I used to use mencoder (part of the mplayer package) to encode videos, but
now I prefer ffmpeg. Here is the way I used to encode a video using
mencoder.
Originally I used to use mplayer to find the width and height of the video
mplayer "$F_NAME.vob" -benchmark -nosound -vo null -endpos 1
but I ended up writing a script that extracted the width and height
width=`mplayer "$1.vob" -benchmark -nosound -vo null -endpos 1 2>/dev/null
| grep '=>' | cut -d' ' -f5 | cut -dx -f1 | tail -n1`
height=`mplayer "$1.vob" -benchmark -nosound -vo null -endpos 1
2>/dev/null | grep '=>' | cut -d' ' -f5 | cut -dx -f2 | tail -n1`
mencoder "$1.vob" -ovc lavc -lavcopts vcodec=mpeg4:vbitrate=$bitrate:v4mv:mbd=2:trell
-vf scale=$width:$height,hqdn3d=2:1:2 -aid $audio -nosub -audio-delay
-0.2 -oac mp3lame -lameopts vbr=3 -o "$1.avi"
For $bitrate I used 1600 for most videos, but 1800 or 2000 for fast
action. I always meant to get around to learning how to do two-pass
encodings so that mplayer would work out the optimum bitrates, but I never
seemed to have enough time.
Of course $audio was usually 128, though many times would be a different
value.
I found that my videos often had a slight sound mismatch so added
-audio-delay -0.2 to fix that.
Once the video is ripped it contains all the audio tracks associated with
it, so if you want to extract that (perhaps as a commentary track) then you
could get it from the vob file. No need to fetch it off the DVD again.
mplayer "videoname.vob" -aid 128 -ao pcm:file="videoname.wav" -vc null -vo
null
lame --vbr-new -V 3 "videoname.wav" "videoname.mp3"
mplayer "videoname.avi" -audiofile "videoname.mp3" -msglevel all=-1
(The -msglevel all=-1 just suppresses error messages.)
One of the reasons I now use ffmpeg is that I can easily encode a video
with multiple soundtracks in the one file. That's probably possible with
mencoder, but I never learned how.
Subtitles are a little trickier. I only know of a way to use mencoder to
rip them. If the subtitle you want to rip is subtitle (sid) 0, which is
mencoder dvd://1 -ovc copy -oac copy -vobsubout "videoname"
-vobsuboutindex 0 -sid 0 -nosound -o /dev/null -vf harddup
I can't remember why I added the filter -vf harddup
A quick way to find out important info about a video file is to put this
mplayer "$1" -v -ao null -vo null -frames 0 2>/dev/null | grep "audio
codec:"
mplayer "$1" -v -ao null -vo null -frames 0 2>/dev/null | grep "VIDEO:"
mplayer "$1" -benchmark -nosound -vo null -endpos 1 2>/dev/null | grep
"=>"
mplayer "$1" -v -ao null -vo null -frames 0 2>/dev/null | grep "==>"
echo
Where $1 is the name of the video file passed to the script .
You can convert the titles to the much better (in my opinion) format .srt
subtitles using vobsub2srt, which you can download from
https://github.com/ruediger/VobSub2SRT
It uses the free, excellent OCR (optical character recognition) program
"tesseract" to go through the subtitles and write them as text along with
timing info to a .srt file. Unfortunately, even though tesseract is getting
better and better it still makes a lot of dumb errors on the subtitles. I
find it's much easier and often better to go to one of the subtitle
archives on the net, such as http://subscene.com/ and search for the DVD
I've bought. This is particularly useful if the DVD doesn't have subtitles.
As I'm getting very deaf I find I can no longer watch movies without
subtitles.
I hope this helps.
- Miriam

--
There are two wolves and they're always fighting.
One is darkness and despair. The other is light and hope.
Which wolf wins?
Whichever one you feed.
-- Casey in Brad Bird's movie "Tomorrowland"
_______________________________________________
MPlayer-users mailing list
https://lists.mplayerhq.hu/mailman/listinfo/mplayer-users

Wow, there's so much info on ffmpeg and mencoder on your message that it
will take me some time to digest.
I'll get back in a couple of days after I test all this.
Thanks a bunch, Miriam.

Cheers,

Rui Correia

Miriam English

2017-09-09 20:58:24 UTC

Permalink

Post by Miriam English
Hi Rui,
I always rip my DVDs to my computer as soon as I buy them. The
plastic they make DVDs out of is so easily scratched I like to
play them just the one time, in ripping them to the computer. Then
I put them away in my DVD case to be taken out again only if the
hard drive gets damaged and my ripped video corrupted.
Hi Miriam,
I've been failing to do that, hence why I already have a couple of
"broken" DVD's. They still play but they have a lot of skipping. They
skip 3 or 4 minutes of playtime due to scratches.
Not a big drama, they were cheap but it's kinda dumb to allow that to
happen and then having to buy a new DVD from the bestbuy. I teach my
daughter to take care of her stuff, and I know she's careful but once
in a while "accidents" happen and a DVD ends up on the floor under
people's shoes...

I've sometimes bought secondhand DVDs. Often they are very badly
scratched. There is a way to fix them, but it takes a lot of time and
patience. Get a cotton bud (like people use to remove makeup) and a
small amount of clean water. Now sit in a comfortable chair and gently
rub the wet cotton bud on the scratched DVD radially, not tangentially
-- that is, from edge to center and center to edge, at right-angles to
the tracks. Don't rub in the same direction as the tracks because
scratches in those directions confuse the laser tracking. It can take an
hour or two to smooth out the worst scratches. I prefer to do it while
watching a movie or listening to a talk.

I've bought some very badly scratched DVDs in the past that wouldn't
play at all. I've managed to rescue some by using a small motorised
handheld device (forgotten what it's called) that has an interchangeable
rotating disk/grinder/polisher attached to the motorised body by a
flexible neck. Anyway I attached a soft polishing disk and very, very
carefully polished out the worst, deepest scratches, always taking care
to polish radially. This is much faster, but leaves the surface with
hundreds of thousands of fine, tiny scratches. The afterward I polished
them out by hand using the wet cotton bud technique.

Post by Miriam English
You don't need dvdnav:// as that's used for showing the DVD menus.
Simply dvd:// is sufficient. Also the video will rip as a vob
file, not as an iso file.
I was trying to find out the right Title with the Main Movie hence why
I was using dvdnav. On the remaining ripping commands I forgot to move
to dvd instead.

I think it will work with dvdnav:// too, sorry.
And I made a mistake reading your command. It didn't occur to me that
you were ripping from an iso file. Silly me. Be careful of that though.
If you've already ripped a damaged DVD to an iso file you'll have an iso
file with damaged information. So you'll get GIGO (garbage in, garbage out).

To quickly find out what titles are on a DVD I use a small program
called vobcopy that came with my operating system. I find mplayer does a
better job of copying the vobs from the DVD, but vobcopy has a lovely
option:

vobcopy -I

which displays a list of all the titles on a DVD. You have to mount the
DVD beforehand, but I put it in a small script that precedes it with
"mount /mnt/dvd" and follows it with "umount /mnt/dvd".

Recently I bought a DVD which had 99 tracks, most of which were fake. I
used the videolan player "vlc" to find out which were the real titles on
the disk. I use it to play a video from the DVD's menu, then while it's
playing, pull down vlc's "Playback" menu, then go down to the "Title"
item and note which title is ticked on the submenu. (That probably
sounds confusing, but it is simple to do, complicated-sounding to describe.)

If I want to find out information about a particular title on the DVD I
use mplayer:

mplayer "dvd://$1" -v -nosound -vo null -frames 0 2>/dev/null | grep -E
'audio|subtitle'

That lists just the audio track info and subtitle info.

Post by Miriam English
mplayer dvd://2 -dumpstream -dumpfile videoname.vob
And by track I would assume it is the same as Title?
Interesting. The result is a VOB, not an M2V? Wow.

Yes. I meant title, sorry. :)
mplayer will play vob files directly. My understanding is they are mp2
encoded mpeg video files, which you could call m2v, I just haven't seen
them called that. (That's not to say that isn't common, just an
indication of my ignorance.) Re-encoding them with one of the mp4 codecs
can achieve tremendous filesize reduction with no obvious loss of
quality if you're careful in the parameters you choose.

--- snip ---

Post by Miriam English
Wow, there's so much info on ffmpeg and mencoder on your message that
it will take me some time to digest.
I'll get back in a couple of days after I test all this.
Thanks a bunch, Miriam.

No worries. Glad to be of help. If stuck on anything give me a yell and
I'll see if I can help further.

Cheers,

- Miriam

--
There are two wolves and they're always fighting.
One is darkness and despair. The other is light and hope.
Which wolf wins?
Whichever one you feed.
-- Casey in Brad Bird's movie "Tomorrowland"

Rui Correia

2017-09-09 21:54:44 UTC

Permalink

Post by Miriam English
Hi Rui,
I always rip my DVDs to my computer as soon as I buy them. The
plastic they make DVDs out of is so easily scratched I like to
play them just the one time, in ripping them to the computer. Then
I put them away in my DVD case to be taken out again only if the
hard drive gets damaged and my ripped video corrupted.
Hi Miriam,
I've been failing to do that, hence why I already have a couple of "broken" DVD's. They still play but they have a lot of skipping. They skip 3 or 4 minutes of playtime due to scratches.
Not a big drama, they were cheap but it's kinda dumb to allow that to happen and then having to buy a new DVD from the bestbuy. I teach my daughter to take care of her stuff, and I know she's careful but once in a while "accidents" happen and a DVD ends up on the floor under people's shoes...

Hi Miriam,
Yep, I've seen guys doing that on youtube videos IIRC. But I guess I
was lazy and just bought new copies. Will reconsider in the future.

I've bought some very badly scratched DVDs in the past that wouldn't play at all. I've managed to rescue some by using a small motorised handheld device (forgotten what it's called) that has an interchangeable rotating disk/grinder/polisher attached to the motorised body by a flexible neck. Anyway I attached a soft polishing disk and very, very carefully polished out the worst, deepest scratches, always taking care to polish radially. This is much faster, but leaves the surface with hundreds of thousands of fine, tiny scratches. The afterward I polished them out by hand using the wet cotton bud technique.

Post by Miriam English
You don't need dvdnav:// as that's used for showing the DVD menus.
Simply dvd:// is sufficient. Also the video will rip as a vob
file, not as an iso file.
I was trying to find out the right Title with the Main Movie hence why I was using dvdnav. On the remaining ripping commands I forgot to move to dvd instead.

No, in this case I am ripping from a good DVD with no scratches on it.
I'd like to rip it in order to put it in a safe place and avoid
scratches but also because I'd like to play on a tablet that my
daughter received as a present.

vobcopy -I
which displays a list of all the titles on a DVD. You have to mount the DVD beforehand, but I put it in a small script that precedes it with "mount /mnt/dvd" and follows it with "umount /mnt/dvd".

Yes, I know vobcopy --info but that doesn't help me much when the DVD
has 99 titles and 12 of them have more than 1h30m.

Recently I bought a DVD which had 99 tracks, most of which were fake. I used the videolan player "vlc" to find out which were the real titles on the disk. I use it to play a video from the DVD's menu, then while it's playing, pull down vlc's "Playback" menu, then go down to the "Title" item and note which title is ticked on the submenu. (That probably sounds confusing, but it is simple to do, complicated-sounding to describe.)

Exactly my problem. And that's what I did too. I spinned the DVD on
VLC, at the menu chose my language and menu>playback>title stated I
was on Title 9.
Then I did the same with MPlayer but it states it is playing Title 8.
Confusing...
Which one would be right?

mplayer "dvd://$1" -v -nosound -vo null -frames 0 2>/dev/null | grep -E 'audio|subtitle'
That lists just the audio track info and subtitle info.

Post by Miriam English
mplayer dvd://2 -dumpstream -dumpfile videoname.vob
And by track I would assume it is the same as Title?
Interesting. The result is a VOB, not an M2V? Wow.

Yes. I meant title, sorry. :)
mplayer will play vob files directly. My understanding is they are mp2 encoded mpeg video files, which you could call m2v, I just haven't seen them called that. (That's not to say that isn't common, just an indication of my ignorance.) Re-encoding them with one of the mp4 codecs can achieve tremendous filesize reduction with no obvious loss of quality if you're careful in the parameters you choose.

From what I learnt a long long time ago, the video track extracted
from a VOB is an MPEG2 video file which usually uses the *.m2v
extension.
And yes, I was thinking on reencoding to x264 and containerize with MKV or MP4.

--- snip ---

Post by Miriam English
Wow, there's so much info on ffmpeg and mencoder on your message that it will take me some time to digest.
I'll get back in a couple of days after I test all this.
Thanks a bunch, Miriam.

No worries. Glad to be of help. If stuck on anything give me a yell and I'll see if I can help further.
Cheers,
- Miriam
--
There are two wolves and they're always fighting.
One is darkness and despair. The other is light and hope.
Which wolf wins?
Whichever one you feed.
-- Casey in Brad Bird's movie "Tomorrowland"

Thanks for all your tips.
Cheers,

Rui Correia

2017-09-09 23:22:08 UTC

Permalink

On Unix / Linux systems, best and easiest way is to rip the dvd or data
cd with one simple command:
dd if=/dev/dvd of=my.file.name.iso bs=2K

You "might" speed up the rip if you use a multiple of 2K, such as 200K.

If your system does not have /dev/dvd, create a symlink to the actual
drive. On my Fedora system I do:
sudo ln -s /dev/sr0 /dev/dvd

Ditto for /dev/cd or /dev/cdrom if one does not already exist.

Post by Miriam English

On Fri, Sep 8, 2017 at 2:18 PM, Miriam English
Hi Rui,
I always rip my DVDs to my computer as soon as I buy them. The
plastic they make DVDs out of is so easily scratched I like to
play them just the one time, in ripping them to the computer. Then
I put them away in my DVD case to be taken out again only if the
hard drive gets damaged and my ripped video corrupted.
Hi Miriam,
I've been failing to do that, hence why I already have a couple of
"broken" DVD's. They still play but they have a lot of skipping. They
skip 3 or 4 minutes of playtime due to scratches.
Not a big drama, they were cheap but it's kinda dumb to allow that to
happen and then having to buy a new DVD from the bestbuy. I teach my
daughter to take care of her stuff, and I know she's careful but once
in a while "accidents" happen and a DVD ends up on the floor under
people's shoes...

I've sometimes bought secondhand DVDs. Often they are very badly
scratched. There is a way to fix them, but it takes a lot of time and
patience. Get a cotton bud (like people use to remove makeup) and a
small amount of clean water. Now sit in a comfortable chair and gently
rub the wet cotton bud on the scratched DVD radially, not tangentially
-- that is, from edge to center and center to edge, at right-angles to
the tracks. Don't rub in the same direction as the tracks because
scratches in those directions confuse the laser tracking. It can take
an hour or two to smooth out the worst scratches. I prefer to do it
while watching a movie or listening to a talk.
I've bought some very badly scratched DVDs in the past that wouldn't
play at all. I've managed to rescue some by using a small motorised
handheld device (forgotten what it's called) that has an
interchangeable rotating disk/grinder/polisher attached to the
motorised body by a flexible neck. Anyway I attached a soft polishing
disk and very, very carefully polished out the worst, deepest
scratches, always taking care to polish radially. This is much faster,
but leaves the surface with hundreds of thousands of fine, tiny
scratches. The afterward I polished them out by hand using the wet
cotton bud technique.

You don't need dvdnav:// as that's used for showing the DVD menus.
Simply dvd:// is sufficient. Also the video will rip as a vob
file, not as an iso file.
I was trying to find out the right Title with the Main Movie hence
why I was using dvdnav. On the remaining ripping commands I forgot to
move to dvd instead.

I think it will work with dvdnav:// too, sorry.
And I made a mistake reading your command. It didn't occur to me that
you were ripping from an iso file. Silly me. Be careful of that
though. If you've already ripped a damaged DVD to an iso file you'll
have an iso file with damaged information. So you'll get GIGO (garbage
in, garbage out).
To quickly find out what titles are on a DVD I use a small program
called vobcopy that came with my operating system. I find mplayer does
a better job of copying the vobs from the DVD, but vobcopy has a
vobcopy -I
which displays a list of all the titles on a DVD. You have to mount
the DVD beforehand, but I put it in a small script that precedes it
with "mount /mnt/dvd" and follows it with "umount /mnt/dvd".
Recently I bought a DVD which had 99 tracks, most of which were fake.
I used the videolan player "vlc" to find out which were the real
titles on the disk. I use it to play a video from the DVD's menu, then
while it's playing, pull down vlc's "Playback" menu, then go down to
the "Title" item and note which title is ticked on the submenu. (That
probably sounds confusing, but it is simple to do,
complicated-sounding to describe.)
If I want to find out information about a particular title on the DVD
mplayer "dvd://$1" -v -nosound -vo null -frames 0 2>/dev/null | grep
-E 'audio|subtitle'
That lists just the audio track info and subtitle info.

mplayer dvd://2 -dumpstream -dumpfile videoname.vob
And by track I would assume it is the same as Title?
Interesting. The result is a VOB, not an M2V? Wow.

Yes. I meant title, sorry. :)
mplayer will play vob files directly. My understanding is they are mp2
encoded mpeg video files, which you could call m2v, I just haven't
seen them called that. (That's not to say that isn't common, just an
indication of my ignorance.) Re-encoding them with one of the mp4
codecs can achieve tremendous filesize reduction with no obvious loss
of quality if you're careful in the parameters you choose.
--- snip ---

Wow, there's so much info on ffmpeg and mencoder on your message that
it will take me some time to digest.
I'll get back in a couple of days after I test all this.
Thanks a bunch, Miriam.

No worries. Glad to be of help. If stuck on anything give me a yell
and I'll see if I can help further.
Cheers,
- Miriam

Rui Correia

2017-09-10 08:16:00 UTC

Permalink

On Sep 10, 2017 00:29, "JD" <***@gmail.com> wrote:

On Unix / Linux systems, best and easiest way is to rip the dvd or data cd
with one simple command:
dd if=/dev/dvd of=my.file.name.iso bs=2K

You "might" speed up the rip if you use a multiple of 2K, such as 200K.

Hi JD,

In all honesty, I just can't see how that would work. dd is a copy command
which just copies blocks of data from an in file to an out file.
A DVD is an encrypted source. If I just run a block copy on an encrypted
file I will end up with a copied file which is also encrypted.
And that's where the definition of the word 'rip' comes to the conversation.
To me, ripping has always been the process of copying and decrypting a DVD
whereas to most people it may just be the process of copying the DVD to a
file...
Besides, I use ddrescue which does something very similar to dd but helps
getting rid of the bad sectors of ARccOS copy protection mechanism.

If your system does not have /dev/dvd, create a symlink to the actual
drive. On my Fedora system I do:
sudo ln -s /dev/sr0 /dev/dvd

Ditto for /dev/cd or /dev/cdrom if one does not already exist.

Ok. But just a question: why would I need to use /dev/dvd?
I could just use /dev/sr0 instead, right?

Post by Miriam English

Post by Miriam English
Hi Rui,
I always rip my DVDs to my computer as soon as I buy them. The
plastic they make DVDs out of is so easily scratched I like to
play them just the one time, in ripping them to the computer. Then
I put them away in my DVD case to be taken out again only if the
hard drive gets damaged and my ripped video corrupted.
Hi Miriam,
I've been failing to do that, hence why I already have a couple of
"broken" DVD's. They still play but they have a lot of skipping. They skip
3 or 4 minutes of playtime due to scratches.
Not a big drama, they were cheap but it's kinda dumb to allow that to
happen and then having to buy a new DVD from the bestbuy. I teach my
daughter to take care of her stuff, and I know she's careful but once in a
while "accidents" happen and a DVD ends up on the floor under people's
shoes...

I've sometimes bought secondhand DVDs. Often they are very badly
scratched. There is a way to fix them, but it takes a lot of time and
patience. Get a cotton bud (like people use to remove makeup) and a small
amount of clean water. Now sit in a comfortable chair and gently rub the
wet cotton bud on the scratched DVD radially, not tangentially -- that is,
from edge to center and center to edge, at right-angles to the tracks.
Don't rub in the same direction as the tracks because scratches in those
directions confuse the laser tracking. It can take an hour or two to smooth
out the worst scratches. I prefer to do it while watching a movie or
listening to a talk.
I've bought some very badly scratched DVDs in the past that wouldn't play
at all. I've managed to rescue some by using a small motorised handheld
device (forgotten what it's called) that has an interchangeable rotating
disk/grinder/polisher attached to the motorised body by a flexible neck.
Anyway I attached a soft polishing disk and very, very carefully polished
out the worst, deepest scratches, always taking care to polish radially.
This is much faster, but leaves the surface with hundreds of thousands of
fine, tiny scratches. The afterward I polished them out by hand using the
wet cotton bud technique.

Post by Miriam English
You don't need dvdnav:// as that's used for showing the DVD menus.
Simply dvd:// is sufficient. Also the video will rip as a vob
file, not as an iso file.
I was trying to find out the right Title with the Main Movie hence why I
was using dvdnav. On the remaining ripping commands I forgot to move to dvd
instead.

I think it will work with dvdnav:// too, sorry.
And I made a mistake reading your command. It didn't occur to me that you
were ripping from an iso file. Silly me. Be careful of that though. If
you've already ripped a damaged DVD to an iso file you'll have an iso file
with damaged information. So you'll get GIGO (garbage in, garbage out).
To quickly find out what titles are on a DVD I use a small program called
vobcopy that came with my operating system. I find mplayer does a better
vobcopy -I
which displays a list of all the titles on a DVD. You have to mount the
DVD beforehand, but I put it in a small script that precedes it with "mount
/mnt/dvd" and follows it with "umount /mnt/dvd".
Recently I bought a DVD which had 99 tracks, most of which were fake. I
used the videolan player "vlc" to find out which were the real titles on
the disk. I use it to play a video from the DVD's menu, then while it's
playing, pull down vlc's "Playback" menu, then go down to the "Title" item
and note which title is ticked on the submenu. (That probably sounds
confusing, but it is simple to do, complicated-sounding to describe.)
If I want to find out information about a particular title on the DVD I
mplayer "dvd://$1" -v -nosound -vo null -frames 0 2>/dev/null | grep -E
'audio|subtitle'
That lists just the audio track info and subtitle info.

Post by Miriam English
mplayer dvd://2 -dumpstream -dumpfile videoname.vob
And by track I would assume it is the same as Title?
Interesting. The result is a VOB, not an M2V? Wow.

Yes. I meant title, sorry. :)
mplayer will play vob files directly. My understanding is they are mp2
encoded mpeg video files, which you could call m2v, I just haven't seen
them called that. (That's not to say that isn't common, just an indication
of my ignorance.) Re-encoding them with one of the mp4 codecs can achieve
tremendous filesize reduction with no obvious loss of quality if you're
careful in the parameters you choose.
--- snip ---

Post by Miriam English
Wow, there's so much info on ffmpeg and mencoder on your message that it
will take me some time to digest.
I'll get back in a couple of days after I test all this.
Thanks a bunch, Miriam.
No worries. Glad to be of help. If stuck on anything give me a yell and

I'll see if I can help further.
Cheers,
- Miriam

_______________________________________________
MPlayer-users mailing list
MPlayer-***@mplayerhq.hu
https://lists.mplayerhq.hu/mailman/listinfo/mplayer-users

Thank you for your input on this subject.

Regards,

Rui Correia