[MPlayer-users] menconder duplicate frames always (NODAEMON)

[D Richard Felker III]

On Fri, Apr 25, 2003 at 10:26:05PM -0500, Jonathan Rogers wrote:
> [Automatic answer: RTFM (read DOCS, FAQ), also read DOCS/bugreports.html]
> D Richard Felker III wrote:
> >So let's see, you have two options:
> >
> >1) Wait for vobcopy/mplayer -dumpstream/whatever to slowly copy the
> >   dvd to your hd, then do the audio prepass quickly, then do the 2
> >   video passes.
> >
> >2) Do the audio prepass slowly from dvd, then do the two video passes
> >   from dvd.
> >
> >Sounds to me like both take the same total time, but option #1 also
> >uses several gigs of hd space and puts extra wear on the hd....what a
> >great idea!! ;))
> 
> I'm pretty sure that reading directly from the DVD for each of three 
> passes will wear out the DVD-ROM drive more than reading the VOB's once. 
> Direct from DVD has to read the same data three times from DVD, instead 
> of once. It also requires the drive motor to be running for many times 
> longer, possibly spinning up and down in the process. The hard drive's 
> motor is running at a constant RPM all the time anyway, and it's 
> designed for that usage pattern, while the DVD-ROM drive probably isn't.
> 
> In my case, I use a machine without a DVD-ROM drive to do the encoding 
> anyway, so I have to copy the VOB's. You would also need to copy them to 
> do any kind of cluster transcoding. The way I do it, copying the VOB's 
> doesn't take long compared to the actual transcoding. Also, who said you 
> had to wait for the VOB's to finish copying before starting the 
> transcode process?

If you start before it finishes, the 'frameno' pass will quickly catch
up to the ripping and end prematurely. This is bad. You can fix this
with something like:

  tail -f stream.dump | mencoder - ...

but that's a bit silly. Anyway, I agree, you're right about wear on
the DVD drive. But I'd rather wear out a cheap DVD drive than wear out
my hd... And the DVD spinning up and down can be avoided by running
hdparm -E1 /dev/cdrom before starting the encode...

BTW, that reminds me, I need to add cdrom/dvd speed setting to
mplayer's dvd and vcd readers...

Rich