ripping cd's

[Chuck Robey]

Andrew Sparrow wrote:
> On Mon, May 02, 2005 at 03:47:15AM +0000, Chuck Robey wrote:

Y'know, I'm getting really a bit tired of this,  I know folks are 
probably doing it for the kindest reasons, but isn't it clear by now 
that I'm trying to learn more about cd's and dvd's, and I DO NOT want to 
buy your particular brand of set top?

Please, NO MORE recommendations of your model, I will not appreciate it. 
  That being said, I know that the responses were all done in good faith.

I have absolutely no wish to provide every person i nthe world with a 
new dvd, I just want to learn how to make what I produce totally 
compatible.  Neither am I really interested in doing illgal things, 
though I will admit my idea of illegal isn't what the Hollywood idiots 
would  have you believe.

> 
>>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..