serving up a dvd collection 'on demand' (w/o the discs)

[Net Llama!]

On Fri, 13 Jan 2006, Douglas J Hunley wrote:
> Anyone seen any articles/pointers on ripping one's entire DVD collection to a
> PC and then making them available to the TVs in the house on demand?
>
> I'm thinking of building a MythTV-like device so that anyone in the family
> could just use the tv to browse the dvd collection, click on a movie, and
> bam.. it's served up from the pc in the basement to the tv.
>
> Anyone seen anything like this?

if your only question/problem is getting the DVD's ripped, that's easy
enough to do with 'dvdrip':
http://www.linux-sxs.org/multimedia/dvdrip.html

however, if you want to make the ripped DVD into something that is
playable with all the menus, etc, then dvdrip is not the way to go, as
that's only going to encode the DVD into some other format without the
menus.  In that case, all you need to do is use dd to rip the DVD (I've
found that you need to first play the DVD to crack CSS before you can use
dd on it), then mount the image over loopback, and copy off all the files.
you can then point xine (or mplayer) at the files/directory like this:
xine dvd:///path/to/dvdfiles
and it will play with all its menus.  how you plug this into mythTV is
left as an exercise for the reader (as i've never setup mythTV).

-- 
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Lonni J Friedman                        netllama at linux-sxs.org
LlamaLand				http://netllama.linux-sxs.org