[MEncoder-users] Encoding from DVD with garbage at begining

[dmoroian at gmail.com]

Hello everyone,
I have tried to convert a dvd to an mpeg4 format in HD resolution (well at  
least the aspect ratio) so I can see it full screen on my TV through a DLNA  
service.
The first try was to play the movie from the dvd with mplayer:
mplayer dvd://1
mplayer dvd://2
...
mplayer dvd://99
No real success. I could start only some of the bonus scenes in this way.
mplayer -identify dvd://1
shows that there are 100 titles on the disc.
I've tried to dump the stream:
mplayer -dumpfile test.dvd -dumpstream dvd://2
again no success. The file produced contained only few black frames.
After few hours of tryings I've seen that "mplayer -ss 5 dvd://2"  
successfully starts the movie (of course skiping the first 5 sec.). Good,  
then I will start encoding using this option:
mencoder -ss 5 -vf scale=1024:576 -oac copy -ovc lavc -lavcopts  
vcodec=mpeg4:vbrate=9800000 -o test.avi dvd://2
It produced the movie, all right, but without sound.
Anyone could give me a clue, how to encode from this dvd? Even if I mount  
the dvd and try to copy the vob's, I get some strange "permision denided"  
message. Is the order of the above options important?

Thanks,
Dragos