[MEncoder-users] riping dvds to avi, retaining original encoding

[florian austin]

I don't own a TV so I watch all of my DVDs on my computer. I want to backup my DVDs to single-sided DVD-Rs and use and abuse those instead of the originals. First, my system recognizes 4.7GB DVD-R disks as 4.2GB disks. Most of my DVDs are larger than this. I want to try to avoid re-encoding my DVDs whenever possible to preserve the original quality. Many of my disks have a lot of extra content that can be dropped.

Now, here's the confusing part. When I ripped "Big Fish" using vobcopy the resulting files are larger than 4.2GB. When I ripped that same DVD using mencoder(see below), the file was small enough to fit on a disk but it apparently did not copy any "seek" information. Also, the resulting avi file would only play in mplayer. I used the following command:

    mencoder dvd://1 -oac copy -ovc copy -o Big_Fish.avi

note: I don't have Internet at home and am submitting this post from somewhere else. I am 99% sure this is the command I used. Unless mencoder complained I would not have passed any additional arguments.

1) Is all that extra data (i think about 500MB or so) seek information?

2) How can I rip this DVD into an AVI container, with seek information, that can also be played using other media players, such as Totem(xine, I believe)

Thanks!
- Florian


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