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A DVD Jukebox Without the DVDs?
Malphaedrius asks: "I'm moving into a friends house with limited storage space and small children with curious fingers. I have decided to make a DVR running Linux and MythTV for two reasons. First, I want a DVR (who doesn't). Second, I want to take our collaborative DVD collections and get them out of the living room, away from grabbing hands. The question, after such a long declaration of intent, is can one rip a DVD and compress it without losing the special features and menus? I don't mind losing them but it would be nice to not have to dig out the discs if I want to listen to the director's commentary. Granted special features and multiple tracks will greatly increase the storage space needed and may be a bad idea in retrospect, but it would be nice to have the option. Has anyone built anything remotely similar to this? If so, how well has it worked?"
If I were you, Id rip the dvd to an ISO file, then compress. When A movie is requested, just decompress, and mount the ISO. Then it would be no different than having the DVD in a drive.
Of course Id either find or write an Application that could add DVDs, and then play them.
Yes, you can.
Yoda of Borg am I! Assimilated shall you be! Futile resistance is, hmm?
... and it's great.
My main reason for wanting to build a DVD jukebox with MythTV was so my kids could watch movies without them destroying their favorite DVDs. It works very well. Even my three year-old can navigate the menus and find the movies he wants without assistance (he insists on it, actually -- gets mad if you do it for him) and without damaging anything.
As for keeping special features and menus, I don't know. If you have plenty of disk space, just store the raw ISO image and xine and mplayer will do the right thing with it. Theoretically, it shouldn't be too hard to rip all of the titles from the DVD, recompress them all, and then remaster a new, smaller ISO image that still has all of the features. I don't know of anything that does it, though.
In my case, I really don't *want* the menus. I want a list of movies and when I pick the one I want, I want it to play the movie, period. No waiting two minutes for the funky intro to play through so the menu items appear. No previews. No nothing, just the movie. YMMV, of course. On the rare occasions I do want to watch some of the other features, I pull the disk off the shelf. But I have lots of shelves, so that may not work as well for you.
BTW, in case you're interested, here are the specs on my system:
I still need to add an IR receiver and an IR transmitter. The receiver so that I can use a remote control (right now I'm using a wireless keyboard. It works fine, but I still want a more "traditional" remote) and the transmitter so that I can configure the MythTV box to automatically power the TV and audio receiver on and off.
Note to ACs: I usually delete AC replies without reading them. If you want to talk to me, log in.
Compress movies with http://www.dvdshrink.org/what.html
if
here is how I would imagine doing it:
1. burn each DVD to an ISO image
2. mount each ISO image to the filesystem
3. figure out how to get MythTV to read them and show them in the menu and play them
-- Betting on the survival of the media industry is a serious risk. I advise investing elsewhere.
A better use for your time will be teaching the little ones how to use the shiny things correctly or not to touch them at all.
"Eve of Destruction", it's not just for old hippies anymore...
As others will no doubt note, vlc and xine will happily process DVD menus on loopback-mounted copies of ISO images (libDVDCSS will crack them without a drive exchange). I suppose one could NFS-export them over a fast-enough network.
You could've hired me.
well i took on the project of backing up all my DVD's to my media server, and then building a lightweight DVR HTPC...well i found the ultimate in online dvd back up knowledge...
.ogm container supports multi audio track as well as multi sub, and i believe the .mkv container supports all the abouve pluse scene selection...im not 100% sure (as i only rip the main movie in .avi with any forced subs) but if anyone can help...its the fair use freedom fighters over at doom 9
http://www.doom9.net/
granted most of the software is based for a windows box...but if you go to the forums you can find a section dedicated for mac and *nix users...that should help you alot....
as far as keeping all the spicial features, its possible, the easiest way, rip to iso, and then mount... but if you want to compress them to mp4, you may lose the little extra vidoe bits (unless you rip those seperatly)...but keeping the extra languages audio tracks and the sub tracks isnt that big of a deal.
i know the
I do the exact thing with an X-Box running XBMC (via a softmod.) I use DVD Shrink to get only the movie and the AC3/DTS sound in English (although my kids loved it when I ripped "The Prisoner of Azkaban" in Spanish.) Much cheaper to set up than a MythTV box and easier too -- just a SAMBA share off of my already existing server. There are also scripts to use XBMC as a MythTV front end, but I've never tried them so I can't comment about them...
Good luck!
It's a Windows program, but DVDRemakePro allows you to remove stuff like the FBI warning screen, trailers, or any other part you want gone while retaining the menus and extras. It ranks right up there with DVDShrink as the most useful DVD tools I have.
I'm sort of doing what you're talking about with the exception of not using MythTV for playback yet since I've not found a DVI flatpanel that I like and can afford yet. *shrug*
I've got DVD Shrink installed on all my Windows machines so that when I get a new batch of discs in, I can rip them in parallel. I also strip off CSS and Macrovision at that time so that the resulting set of files on the media server is unencumbered. For playback, I use Media Player Classic (again in Windows) to display the shows although I've verified that vlc and mplayer will also play them. I used to be able to use Apple's DVD player software on a mini, but after upgrading to Tiger and getting the latest version of the DVD player software, it won't let me play off the fileserver anymore (damn the MPAA).
Be ready to shell out some serious bucks for storage space as not doing transcoding/trimming puts some serious hurt on a pile of drives. I've ripped just shy of 300 discs (297 to be exact) and have eaten 1.6 TB out of my 1.8 TB array.
My dream is to be able to just pop the disc into a machine and have it rip the contents, decrypt and drop Macrovision and then spit the disc back out but I've not figured out a nice way to do that yet. I also want to add more storage but I've maxed out the current case and cases with lots of drive bays are quite spendy.
James
My sister ended up buying a few giant CD wallets. You can condense entire shelves full of media into a small package, easily kept away from wee fingers.
It will take weeks to rip a big collection, the wallets might be a good stop-gap solution anyhow.
With mythtv (and mythdvd/mythvideo), one cannot easily rip -> compress a DVD and keep it as , well, a DVD.
However, one *can* rip the various video segements of a DVD without any hassle with mythdvd and store them. Eg, the "making of" sections of DVD's.
You can also select which audio track to rip, although I believe you cannot rip multi-track (that is, standard audio and a commentary track) with the mythdvd ripper. You can rip different versions of a movie with (for example) the directors commentary as audio , but that's getting a little wastful of disk space.
Me? I just rip the "bare" movie - at 750kbps PAL video, with a two-pass run, they come out fine. The best part is that with the MythDVD ripper, it can be done with about 3 presses of the remote.
You are in a twisty maze of processor lines, all alike.
There is a lot of hype here.
dd if=/dev/hdc of=~/name_of_movie.iso
...should work. Just mount the image instead of the device and use it as you normally would.
A firewall can not protect you from yourself. Turn off what you do not need. Do not use the firewall to do your work.
checkout http://www.slysoft.com/en/ I have used them for a similar purpose. I uuse clonevd2 to rip and save them as an image, in this process you can adjust the quality ect. This paired with virtualclonedrive is sweet, I have all my dvd iso's on my fileserver and with virtualclonedrive installed on my pc i click on the image and it is just as it i put that disk into the the dvd drive.
This isn't quite as simple as just ripping the iso image, but it can easily be done. I'm assuming you're running on *nix.
First, you'll use either vobcopy or dvdbackup to mirror the dvd image to your hard drive decrypting the css. Vobcopy is slightly nicer to use. Ogle can usually play that copied dvd filesystem as is, but I've some trouble with a few dvd's. So, you use 'mkisofs --dvd-video' to create a dvd udf filesystem. Then, you point xine to that udf image as the dvd device, and it works.
It took me a little bit of research to figure all that out, but it works. You'll end up with a perfect copy of your dvd without any lossy transcoding.
Hope that helps.
2. small, inquisitive fingers
Solution:
A couple of 128 CD cases, on a shelf. Cheap, fast access, more secure than a hard drive, portable. Not as geeky as a mythtv solution, but sometimes simple is best.
DVDShrink + DVDDecrypter (get it NOW) can preserve as much or as little of the original as you want. Netflix + DVDShrink is addictive.
I like commentary tracks, but I generally don't care about other "special features".
I use DVD::Rip, which supports multiple tracks. I use ffmpeg mpeg4 and ogg vorbis for the audio. Sometimes I use the AC3 passthrough for the main audio, and vorbis for commentary, depending on how much space I'm willing to use.
-Peter
Just thought I'd throw in that I did pretty much what was asked, though I'll leave you with one missing link if you want an all-linux solution. I had several mythtv frontends all pulling movie files (a mix of downloaded and ripped) off a central nfs store. .iso's to open in xine, at which point you'll have all your menus and what not just as they came on the dvd. I did this with a number of dvd's from blockbuster's mail rental service and it worked quite well. Only problem, as others have noted, is the size. Not much help for you there until someone comes up with a real snazzy way to recode the video to mpeg-4 and still have the menus work.
The nice thing many people don't realize about xine is that there is no need to mount images, deal with loop, cloop etc or anything like that. a simple "xine image.iso" will play the movie just as if it was in a drive.
Unfortunately, I have yet to find a linux solution that takes the place of dvd decrypter for the dvd->iso step. MythDVD rips video only. My old protocol was: Rip to iso with dvd decrypter. Copy to file server. Fire up mythvideo and add the iso file.
that's it. The ISO will be indexed just like any random avi you have, and you can set the association for
DVD Jukeboxes are a great idea for a shared house. I set one up when I was at Uni in 2000 sharing a house with 5 people, using a geforce 2 with tv out and an RF Mouse (the living room was in the attic and the room with the system in was directly below). This worked fantastic as I had not only the 80+ DVDs on my system but access to everyone elses DVD's over the house network. The only problem was that even with 6 PCs going at it it still took each one 30-40 minutes to rip the DVD then another 10 hours to shrink each one and you cant do much with the computer while its converting the file. With only one pc to do the converting its going to take you ages (depending on the size of your collection) to get them all done.