ripping cd's

[Andrew Sparrow]

On Mon, May 02, 2005 at 03:47:15AM +0000, Chuck Robey wrote:
> I am rather amazed that the video work on my amd64 box is going to 
> remarkably well.  The sound works digitally across 5.1  channels, and 
> what's more, it looks like all of k3b's functions (at least to the point 
> I understand them) are all working.  All completely without any reliance 
> whatsoever upon x86 compatibility.  It's all done with native-built 
> ports, no packages.
> 
> Anyhow, I have acidrip working well, and I've ripped a dvd.  This is 
> that dvd from a few weeks ago, its' got region==2, and it's in PAL, so I 
> want to set it up in some format that plays in my friend's old dvd 
> player, so he can finally, at long last *see* the dvd he paid for.

Uh, Y'know, the Cyberhome CH-300 s a tiny little DVD settop. It has
has a secret squirrel menu to set it multi-region, does some of the
best NTSC/PAL conversion I've seen - ever - on-the-fly, and plays
all kinds of non-standard formats[0] without blinking an eye.

It has progressive scan, SPDIF output and extra stuff I could care
less about - but it Just Works.

They run $30-$50 at Rat Shack, depending they're on offer at the
moment (they often are). They had a bad rap for reliablity at first
- but I've been hammering mine for a year, and nary a glitch..

Mine groks dvdatuthor'd DVDs and VCD/SVCD/XVCD/KVCD etc. generated
by vcdimager just fine (and then burnt with cdrecord-ProDVD/growisfs/cdrdao
etc).

I mention the settop box because transcoding from PAL to NTSC is a
CPU pig, - and inevitably the requantization will lose qaulity. But
not as much as the transcoding will... And you cannot avoid the
transcoding if you're scaling from NTSC to PAL or vice versa.

Going from DVD9 to DVD5 will also lose quality. Period. You may not
notice it, but you're reducing a ~8.5GB DVD to half that.. Unless
you're going to burn this on a $13 dollar DL blank(!), and I don't
even know how many DVD players will grok those yet.

> He could have watched it some weeks ago on my system, but he wants to 
> see it at home.  How unreasonable!  Anyhow, after I ripped it with 
> Acidrip, it came right up on an .avi format, all in the same format. 

I sympathise. I have a bunch of Region 2 DVD9 DVD's. I leave them
alone and I play them in my $40 settop DVD player. They play great.

> So, question, anyone know what sort of format plays from a cd to a dvd 
> player (I am happily willing to lose the menus)

My personal favorite is tovid: http://tovid.sourceforge.net/

It's got a few Linux-ism's - but not that many[1], and it seems to
do overall, the most reliable, best quality, most efficient, job
of all the myriad of conversion scripts I've seen to date. It'll
read a DVD directly and re-quant it, IIRC (I don't ever do that).

The dvdrip (dvd::rip) port will turn your DVD into a VCD or an AVI
etc.  I believe it may also convert the menus and extras etc. for
you too.

There's also ldvd9to5 in the ports collection, which may or may not
do precisely what you want (I believe it should do, but unfortunately,
the menu options are all German, which I can't read). And I've never
had the patience to run it long enough to see.

There's a 'Doze freeware program called DVDShrink, which actually
does an awesome job of shrinking a DVD9 to a DVD5. Much better than
any *nix-based software, I'm sorry to say. It's default setting is
to remove region codes.

It apparently runs fine under Wine on Linux, although I haven't
tested it myself as my laptop is stuck in 4.x land (where Wine
doesn't work anymore and my licensed copy of VMware hates me), and
I only just got a desktop.

Hope this helps. Feel free to ask questions off-list if you want.
There's some very neat tools already in the ports collection.

Cheers,

Andy

[0] for example, NTSC DVD's with MP2 audio - like you tend to get
with extracted TyStreams - are not strictly standards-compliant.

[1] Mostly things like the location of bash, Linux flags to df,
using /proc/cpuinfo etc.  A port is almost not worth submitting, athough
I guess I could clean up what I have sometime, anyway..