Slashdot Mirror

← Back to Stories (view on slashdot.org)

Archiving DVD's with Linux?

Posted by Cliff on from the putting-your-movies-on-those-spinning-silver-platters dept.

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?"

1 of 45 comments (clear)

  1. It's not very difficult at all, actually... by Ramses0 · · Score: 4, Interesting

    After ironing out issues between the Adaptec/SCSI firmware and my DVD drive, it took ~2 hours to get my Linux box playing encrypted DVD's (with a little help from the friendly people in #debian).

    Basically, my process was: Bootable Debian 2.2 CD installation. apt-get install kernel-image-2.4.18-k7; vim /etc/lilo.conf; lilo; shutdown -r now; I don't think I needed to update my kernel, but I want USB support for later on, so it's kindof necessary. apt-get install ogle, run the included install-illegal-decss-library.sh script that it told me I needed. Run ogle from the supplied menu shortcut, open and play the DVD. Once you know what you're looking for, it's remarkably simple.

    I have 200+ CD's. I had most of them MP3'd before at 192 bitrate, but now I'm using abcde with oggenc -q7 for VBR OGGfiles averaging 200-250kbps since the quality is better. I own 20-40 DVD's. I want to stuff my DVD's to my harddrive because I'm basically a geek with too much hard-drive space. :^)

    I bought all my PC parts in pieces following the specifications given by those nifty Spindl3top people (hi lucas :^). Including Black Slot-loading DVD, and Black LCD display. Most of it came from directron.com, or harddrive.com. Got Quake 3 and the Matrix Orbital LCD display from linuxcentral.com. Bought all of the $9.99 linux games I could from EBGames, and some of the newer ones from TuxGames. I need to buy the 'Loki Installer' for RTCW because I bought RTCW from BestBuy since couldn't wait any longer after I finally got all my hardware talking to each other.

    As a technology pragmatist, I recognize that there are a multitude of competing video container formats (mov, avi, mpg) with multiple supported codecs. I don't know which tools are mature on which platform, and what quality/stability issues remain to be ironed out, which is why I asked slashdot in the first place. :^)

    Looks like I came to the right place since there are a bunch of high-quality responses and no "check google you dumbass" postings. ;^)

    --Robert