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Archiving DVD's with Linux?
Ramses0 asks: "Now that I've got my Linux box 100% functional with full DVD support, I want to archive all my media to it's 60gb hard drive. Since I don't have 60gb's of OGGable CD's, I started looking with a lustful eye at ripping and encoding my DVD collection to the hard drive as well. Most of the guides out today are targetted towards windows software, which is not an option for me. The only reference I could find to encoding under Linux is about ffmpeg on the DivX website. What is the best file format to target? DivX? VCD? What tools are available under Linux to encode DVDs? Why isn't there the equivalent of abcde for DVDs?"
Mplayer which is an excellent Linux media player (including dvd support) also comes with an encoder called mencoder which can output Divx;) avi files from your dvds, supports 2 pass encoding and subtitles, and other fun stuff like that. It works (well) for me. Mplayer is a great player in my opinion and it supports almost every file format i've encountered excluding sorenson quicktime.
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transcode is a fantastic app. It can convert just about any kind of video stream to any other kind. It supports cropping, resizing, etc etc. Careful with the current prereleases, there are some nasty A/V sync issues. 0.6.0pre1 & 2 work best for me.
It's pretty tough to get right on the commandline, so grab dvd::rip, a nice perl/gtk frontend. Most useful, dvd::rip has a nice gui for using transcode's cluster encoding. That's right, you can build a dvd-ripping cluster. I have a 4-node setup, and it only takes a few hours to rip a dvd, using two-pass DivX 4.02. Careful with the newer prereleases, there are some nasty A/V sync issues. 0.6.0pre1 & 2 seem to work best for me.
I would suggest using one of the MPEG-4 variants (DivX 4.x, or XviD) in two-pass mode. In my experience, this produces very good quality. I rip my movies to one 1.4gb file, which I then split onto two CDs. You might be able to afford slightly larger file sizes, to do AC3 audio pass-through, for example.
If you double or triple your storage capacity, consider just storing the unencrypted VOB files - you'll get superior audio & video, as well as all the alternate audio & subtitle tracks.
Try looking at Drip http://drip.sourceforge.net/ and dvd::rip http://www.exit1.org/dvdrip/
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Mencoder is easier, transcode is more versatile (I think).
Mencoder is the "encoding" project that goes along with Mplayer, which in my opinion is probably the best-performing media player with the widest support for files and codecs (including Windows Media codecs, using the 'native' Windows DLL's) for linux at the moment, though not necessarily the easiest to use (not difficult, in my opinion, either, just not "clicky-pointy" simple like, say, Xine).
Trans code, on the other hand, has a bewildering variety of options to work through, but has a ton of functionality to go with it.
In both cases, the software handles reading DVD's, and can convert them to other formats. Transcode handles a bunch of different formats and codecs. Mencoder is limited to .avi file format at the moment, but can put a variety of codecs into this avi (including vorbis audio, as I recall). I've also found that you can even use mencoder to "capture" mms:// files for offline perusing or conversion, which is nice, since otherwise I wouldn't get anything but the Microsoft "Download Media Player for Mac or Windows" page whenever I tried to view such things...
For MPlayer/Mencoder, I strongly recommend reading the documentation (the software is great, but the impatience of the people on the mplayer mailing lists with people asking questions that are answered in the documentation are well known) and using a recent set of CVS sources.
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