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

[JD]

On Unix / Linux systems, best and easiest way is to rip the dvd or data 
cd with one simple command:
dd if=/dev/dvd of=my.file.name.iso bs=2K

You "might" speed up the rip if you use a multiple of 2K, such as 200K.

If your system does not have /dev/dvd, create a symlink to the actual
drive. On my Fedora system I do:
sudo ln -s /dev/sr0 /dev/dvd

Ditto for /dev/cd or /dev/cdrom if one does not already exist.


On 09/09/2017 02:58 PM, Miriam English 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.
>
> 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).
>
> 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:
>
> vobcopy -I
>
> 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".
>
> 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.)
>
> 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.
>
> --- 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
>