[MPlayer-users] Can I get a few tips on DVD ripping?

[Rui Correia]

On Sat, Sep 9, 2017 at 9:58 PM, Miriam English <mim at miriam-english.org> wrote:
>
>
>
> Rui Correia wrote:
>>
>> On Fri, Sep 8, 2017 at 2:18 PM, Miriam English <mim at miriam-english.org <mailto:mim at miriam-english.org>> wrote:
>>
>>     Hi Rui,
>>
>>     I always rip my DVDs to my computer as soon as I buy them. The
>>     plastic they make DVDs out of is so easily scratched I like to
>>     play them just the one time, in ripping them to the computer. Then
>>     I put them away in my DVD case to be taken out again only if the
>>     hard drive gets damaged and my ripped video corrupted.
>>
>> Hi Miriam,
>> I've been failing to do that, hence why I already have a couple of "broken" DVD's. They still play but they have a lot of skipping. They skip 3 or 4 minutes of playtime due to scratches.
>> Not a big drama, they were cheap but it's kinda dumb to allow that to happen and then having to buy a new DVD from the bestbuy. I teach my daughter to take care of her stuff, and I know she's careful but once in a while "accidents" happen and a DVD ends up on the floor under people's shoes...
>
>
> I've sometimes bought secondhand DVDs. Often they are very badly scratched. There is a way to fix them, but it takes a lot of time and patience. Get a cotton bud (like people use to remove makeup) and a small amount of clean water. Now sit in a comfortable chair and gently rub the wet cotton bud on the scratched DVD radially, not tangentially -- that is, from edge to center and center to edge, at right-angles to the tracks. Don't rub in the same direction as the tracks because scratches in those directions confuse the laser tracking. It can take an hour or two to smooth out the worst scratches. I prefer to do it while watching a movie or listening to a talk.
>
Hi Miriam,
Yep, I've seen guys doing that on youtube videos IIRC. But I guess I
was lazy and just bought new copies. Will reconsider in the future.
> I've bought some very badly scratched DVDs in the past that wouldn't play at all. I've managed to rescue some by using a small motorised handheld device (forgotten what it's called) that has an interchangeable rotating disk/grinder/polisher attached to the motorised body by a flexible neck. Anyway I attached a soft polishing disk and very, very carefully polished out the worst, deepest scratches, always taking care to polish radially. This is much faster, but leaves the surface with hundreds of thousands of fine, tiny scratches. The afterward I polished them out by hand using the wet cotton bud technique.
>
>>
>>     You don't need dvdnav:// as that's used for showing the DVD menus.
>>     Simply dvd:// is sufficient. Also the video will rip as a vob
>>     file, not as an iso file.
>>
>> I was trying to find out the right Title with the Main Movie hence why I was using dvdnav. On the remaining ripping commands I forgot to move to dvd instead.
>
>
> I think it will work with dvdnav:// too, sorry.
> And I made a mistake reading your command. It didn't occur to me that you were ripping from an iso file. Silly me. Be careful of that though. If you've already ripped a damaged DVD to an iso file you'll have an iso file with damaged information. So you'll get GIGO (garbage in, garbage out).
>
No, in this case I am ripping from a good DVD with no scratches on it.
I'd like to rip it in order to put it in a safe place and avoid
scratches but also because I'd like to play on a tablet that my
daughter received as a present.
>
> To quickly find out what titles are on a DVD I use a small program called vobcopy that came with my operating system. I find mplayer does a better job of copying the vobs from the DVD, but vobcopy has a lovely option:
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> vobcopy -I
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> which displays a list of all the titles on a DVD. You have to mount the DVD beforehand, but I put it in a small script that precedes it with "mount /mnt/dvd" and follows it with "umount /mnt/dvd".
>
Yes, I know vobcopy --info but that doesn't help me much when the DVD
has 99 titles and 12 of them have more than 1h30m.
>
> Recently I bought a DVD which had 99 tracks, most of which were fake. I used the videolan player "vlc" to find out which were the real titles on the disk. I use it to play a video from the DVD's menu, then while it's playing, pull down vlc's "Playback" menu, then go down to the "Title" item and note which title is ticked on the submenu. (That probably sounds confusing, but it is simple to do, complicated-sounding to describe.)
>
Exactly my problem. And that's what I did too. I spinned the DVD on
VLC, at the menu chose my language and menu>playback>title stated I
was on Title 9.
Then I did the same with MPlayer but it states it is playing Title 8.
Confusing...
Which one would be right?
>
> If I want to find out information about a particular title on the DVD I use mplayer:
>
> mplayer "dvd://$1" -v -nosound -vo null -frames 0 2>/dev/null | grep -E 'audio|subtitle'
>
> That lists just the audio track info and subtitle info.
>
>>
>>     If the track I want is track 2 then I use:
>>     mplayer dvd://2 -dumpstream -dumpfile videoname.vob
>>
>> And by track I would assume it is the same as Title?
>> Interesting. The result is a VOB, not an M2V? Wow.
>
> Yes. I meant title, sorry. :)
> mplayer will play vob files directly. My understanding is they are mp2 encoded mpeg video files, which you could call m2v, I just haven't seen them called that. (That's not to say that isn't common, just an indication of my ignorance.) Re-encoding them with one of the mp4 codecs can achieve tremendous filesize reduction with no obvious loss of quality if you're careful in the parameters you choose.
>
>From what I learnt a long long time ago, the video track extracted
from a VOB is an MPEG2 video file which usually uses the *.m2v
extension.
And yes, I was thinking on reencoding to x264 and containerize with MKV or MP4.
> --- snip ---
>>
>>
>> Wow, there's so much info on ffmpeg and mencoder on your message that it will take me some time to digest.
>> I'll get back in a couple of days after I test all this.
>> Thanks a bunch, Miriam.
>>
> No worries. Glad to be of help. If stuck on anything give me a yell and I'll see if I can help further.
>
> Cheers,
>
>     - Miriam
>
> --
> There are two wolves and they're always fighting.
> One is darkness and despair. The other is light and hope.
> Which wolf wins?
> Whichever one you feed.
>  -- Casey in Brad Bird's movie "Tomorrowland"
>

Thanks for all your tips.
Cheers,

Rui Correia