ripping cd's

[Jacob Meuser]

On Sun, May 01, 2005 at 09:49:52PM -0700, Andrew Sparrow wrote:
> 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.

recent versions of both ffmpeg and transcode have some snappy amd64
optimizations.

I can _just about_ capture live NTSC from bktr, and audio too and
output DVD compliant program streams on a modest amd64 machine.
heck, on "slow" OpenBSD nonetheless.

but yes, generally speaking, PAL <-> NTSC is CPU intensive.

> Going from DVD9 to DVD5 will also lose quality. Period. You may not

a lot of DVD9 material is useless filler.  you can cut that out and
rebuild the DVD file structure, without ever reencoding/requantizing.
in such case (the common case), you will not lose any quality.

> 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).

streamDVD or tcrequant from transcode.  I recommend requantizing,
with some limits.  it's much, much fater than reencoding. and if I
stay close to the default quantization changes, in most cases I really
don't notice much difference (an example artifact would be "four
point halos" around bright areas).

> 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.

pretty much all this does is repack the DVD, allowing you to leave
out the filler.  granted, there is no such GUI on *nix, at least not
one in wide distribution, but isn't that the case with many tasks with
Win vs Nix?

-- 
<jakemsr at jakemsr.com>