[MPlayer-users] DVD Ripping trick

[emaillist+mpu at dogphilosophy.net]

On Monday 29 April 2002 03:24 pm, Chris Phillips wrote:
> > 	For those of you that don't like doing a 3-pass dvd to divx conversion,
> > you can rip the movie to the HD in several minutes and 'mencode' from
> > there:
> >
> > 	mencoder -dvd 1 -oac copy -ovc copy -o dvdmovie.avi
[...]
> I think that that's just extremely obvious, and also it's NOT an avi, so
> why on earth are you calling it one? the docs contain info on -ovc copy
> and such like, so if, for example, you wanted to copy a dvd stream
> directly to a hard drive and then encode it later, then that's obviously
> what you'd do... or am i missing something? i really can't see a "trick" as
> such, just a great way to fill up /tmp or whatever.

The "trick" is that it IS an .avi once the above is run - it "copies" the 
DVD data, unmodified, presumably so that if you have room on the hard drive, 
you can then do the three-pass encoding significantly faster than it would
be if you read each pass from the DVD drive.  I assume the above also
decrypts the data as it reads, so what you get is an unprocessed set of 
audio and video data, pre-decrypted, from the DVD to the hard drive, for
easy re-processing later.

You can use a similar "trick" to grab videos off of the internet (such as
.wmv and .asf files) "unprocessed" but in .avi format for conversion later
if you want with something like:

mencoder -oac pcm -ovc copy -ofps 23.976 -o asffile.avi 
mms://some.damnedmicrosoftonlysite.com/proprietaryfile.asf

(the -oac pcm seems to be necessary - presumably you could do -oac mp3 if you
wanted, but that sort of defeats the purpose of getting the data saved with as
little processing as possible).  Naturally if you're planning to create PAL
streams of "NTSC Video" (not "Film") you'd use -ofps 25 or -ofps 29.970 ...