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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?"
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.
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No need for decompressing the image first. Just mount the compressed image with cloop.
DNA is the ultimate spaghetti code.
Compress movies with http://www.dvdshrink.org/what.html
if
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