Converting DVDs To VCDs Under Unix?

This Curious Anonymous Coward asks: "There are many great apps running under others-buggy-OS to rip DVDs and to automatically convert the resulting MPEG to a less space-hungry resolution/bandwidth. These apps basically read the VOBs from the DVD, decrypt them, split audio and video and resample the resulting MPEG to a SVCD compliant resolution. Under Linux I found everything I need to do the same, except for the resampling step. Of course, I don't want to rip DVD I don't own, I just want to be able to burn SVCD to see my favourite movies on my laptop (with no DVD reader), and to delete the HD partition dedicated to the other-buggy-OS."

Comments

Tools for Buggy OS's?

[jelwell]

Where can these tools be found for "Other Buggy Os's"? I'd be interested in finding out about said tools for any OS.

Joseph Elwell.

Re:"Convert"?

[BJH]

convert just calls mpeg2decode (however, you should be able to find more information in the DVD HOWTO).

"Convert"?

[Christopher Thomas]

Under Linux I found everything I need to do the same, except for the resampling step.

"man convert" lists "MPEG" as a supported file extension. Have you tried using "convert" to rescale it?

"convert" is part of the ImageMagick utility package, and is included with most Linux distributions.

Some links

[bbk]

I haven't done DVD -> SVCD under linux, but I have made VCD's and SVCD's from video files I captured with my BUZ card.

The VCD tools (for making VCD images) are availible from here:
http://www.munich-vision.de/vcd/index.html

As for the conversion and DVD issues, anyone else have suggestions?

You may just want to stick with Windows for this - the best encoders are there (Tsunami is great!), and the process is quite a bit more streamlined on that side.

BBK