Question

[Matthew Carpenter]

Not only do I have a Dual-layer burner that I picked up for about $100 last 
year, but I have a bit of experience ripping and encoding DVD's using K3b and 
Transcode.  I use the first one to actually rip the video stream from the 
DVD, since K3b's interface is rather friendly.  Even though K3b also allows 
you to encode the video, I've found it to be rather hit or miss as to what 
the results look like.  After many many hours of refining a transcoding 
script, I determined the most frequent cause of pain was the sudden shift in 
frames-per-second within the first few minutes.  Transcode starts at the FPS 
rate at the beginning of the movie and continues with that the whole way 
(sometimes ending the video stream even 30 minutes before the audio stream is 
done).  So I tell Transcode to take a sample from about 5 minutes into the 
stream and I'm usually good.

Once in a while, though, I'll hit a movie like Star Wars Episode II or The 
Matrix (only the first one), where parts of the movie are a mess of 
spaghetti-video and the resulting audio/video will be out of sync.  
Spaghetti-video is where the DVD has angle "commands" encoded that the DVD 
player follows but Transcode does not.  So in The Matrix, whenever they have 
a special effect of stop-action rapid-rotation cinematography (ie. Trinity 
suspended in mid-air before a kick while the camera rotates around her), 
several views get encoded, and the A/V gets a second or two out of sync... 
and you get to see Trin do the same kick over and over (about 4 times).
I've not found a cure for this one yet, but it's probably already on it's way 
or I've simply overlooked something.

On Kubuntu, Transcode is not included, and when installing Transcode from 
Debian Sarge you find out that K3b can't handle the new version of Transcode.  
That is only of concern since I like to rip the DVD to the HD prior to 
encoding, and I don't know the toolset well enough to be flexible in the 
method.  One of these days I'll sit down and figure out how to rip it before 
encoding.  Transcode has some very nice HTML documentation on how to do many 
different things with it included in the package.

Mencoder (part of MPlayer) also has all these capabilities, but I've not done 
much with it.  Since it is part of the Kubuntu included software, I might 
someday figure out how to do the same things with Mencoder.  I want to rip 
the Incedibles soon since I just got it :)

I don't write the DVD's to another removable medium, though.  To do that, 
there is a different process, including the creation of a SVCD image and 
writing an SVCD or DVD, etc...  I simply rip them and encode to DivX 
(actually I use xvid) format on the hard drive.  That way I can call them up 
easily and not worry about the original or even backup DVD's.

A decent quality encoding will run my about 1.5GB per movie depending on the 
length and relative action of the flic.


On Sunday 01 May 2005 07:25 pm, Bruce Marshall wrote:
> On Sunday 01 May 2005 06:15 pm, Rick Sivernell wrote:
> > Hey all
> >
> > ? ?Had a bit of an argument last night about ripping movies to dvd. This
> > is possible under linux, is it not? If yes where do I get info to back
> > myself up.
>
> Hope someone else answers...   The major problem is that almost all movies
> are recorded on dual-layered DVD's and the amount of data is usually in the
> range of 7GB or more.
>
> Tough nut to crack with the usual single DVD burners most people have.
>
> And I'm not sure what k3b would do with a DL burner but I think it might
> work.
>

-- 
Matthew Carpenter 
matt at eisgr.com                          http://www.eisgr.com/

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