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

[Rui Correia]

On Fri, Sep 8, 2017 at 2:18 PM, Miriam English <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...

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.

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.

>
> I used to use mencoder (part of the mplayer package) to encode videos, but
> now I prefer ffmpeg. Here is the way I used to encode a video using
> mencoder.
>
> Originally I used to use mplayer to find the width and height of the video
>
> mplayer "$F_NAME.vob" -benchmark -nosound -vo null -endpos 1
>
> but I ended up writing a script that extracted the width and height
> automatically for me and inserted those values into the mencoder command:
>
> width=`mplayer "$1.vob" -benchmark -nosound -vo null -endpos 1 2>/dev/null
> | grep '=>' | cut -d' ' -f5 | cut -dx -f1 | tail -n1`
> height=`mplayer "$1.vob" -benchmark -nosound -vo null -endpos 1
> 2>/dev/null | grep '=>' | cut -d' ' -f5 | cut -dx -f2 | tail -n1`
> mencoder "$1.vob" -ovc lavc -lavcopts vcodec=mpeg4:vbitrate=$bitrate:v4mv:mbd=2:trell
> -vf scale=$width:$height,hqdn3d=2:1:2 -aid $audio -nosub -audio-delay
> -0.2 -oac mp3lame -lameopts vbr=3 -o "$1.avi"
>
> For $bitrate I used 1600 for most videos, but 1800 or 2000 for fast
> action. I always meant to get around to learning how to do two-pass
> encodings so that mplayer would work out the optimum bitrates, but I never
> seemed to have enough time.
> Of course $audio was usually 128, though many times would be a different
> value.
> I found that my videos often had a slight sound mismatch so added
> -audio-delay -0.2 to fix that.
>
>
> Once the video is ripped it contains all the audio tracks associated with
> it, so if you want to extract that (perhaps as a commentary track) then you
> could get it from the vob file. No need to fetch it off the DVD again.
>
> If the audio ID is 128:
>
> mplayer "videoname.vob" -aid 128 -ao pcm:file="videoname.wav" -vc null -vo
> null
>
> You could then convert it to mp3 using lame:
>
> lame --vbr-new -V 3 "videoname.wav" "videoname.mp3"
>
> You could then play the video with the separate commentary audio file:
>
> mplayer "videoname.avi" -audiofile "videoname.mp3"  -msglevel all=-1
>
> (The -msglevel all=-1 just suppresses error messages.)
>
> One of the reasons I now use ffmpeg is that I can easily encode a video
> with multiple soundtracks in the one file. That's probably possible with
> mencoder, but I never learned how.
>
>
> Subtitles are a little trickier. I only know of a way to use mencoder to
> rip them. If the subtitle you want to rip is subtitle (sid) 0, which is
> usually the English soundtrack, and the dvd title is title 1:
>
> mencoder dvd://1 -ovc copy -oac copy -vobsubout "videoname"
> -vobsuboutindex 0 -sid 0 -nosound -o /dev/null -vf harddup
>
> I can't remember why I added the filter -vf harddup
>
>
> A quick way to find out important info about a video file is to put this
> in a script:
>
>     mplayer "$1" -v -ao null -vo null -frames 0 2>/dev/null | grep "audio
> codec:"
>     mplayer "$1" -v -ao null -vo null -frames 0 2>/dev/null | grep "VIDEO:"
>     mplayer "$1" -benchmark -nosound -vo null -endpos 1 2>/dev/null | grep
> "=>"
>     mplayer "$1" -v -ao null -vo null -frames 0 2>/dev/null | grep "==>"
>     echo
>
> Where $1 is the name of the video file passed to the script .
>
>
> You can convert the titles to the much better (in my opinion) format .srt
> subtitles using vobsub2srt, which you can download from
> https://github.com/ruediger/VobSub2SRT
> It uses the free, excellent OCR (optical character recognition) program
> "tesseract" to go through the subtitles and write them as text along with
> timing info to a .srt file. Unfortunately, even though tesseract is getting
> better and better it still makes a lot of dumb errors on the subtitles. I
> find it's much easier and often better to go to one of the subtitle
> archives on the net, such as http://subscene.com/ and search for the DVD
> I've bought. This is particularly useful if the DVD doesn't have subtitles.
> As I'm getting very deaf I find I can no longer watch movies without
> subtitles.
>
> I hope this helps.
>
>     - Miriam
>
>
>
> Rui Correia wrote:
>
>> Hello,
>> I have quite a few legally owned Disney DVD's that I would like to rip so
>> that my daughter can watch them on her tablet and avoid scratching the DVD
>> discs. If I wanted anything to do with piracy I would download the torrent
>> or whatever. ;-)
>> My NAS runs Linux Debian (OpenMediaVault) and it has a DVD recorder on it
>> that I would like to use for ripping. Being a NAS, it doesn't have a GUI
>> (X11/Wayland) so I have to try and achieve this all on the CLI. Hence why
>> I
>> am trying Mplayer for this task.
>> I'm only interested in the main movie, with two audio languages (my native
>> and English) and my native language subtitles for when watching it in
>> English audio. Also I'd like to retain chapter timecodes and to
>> containerize inside a MP4/MKV file that will be shared on the LAN through
>> the NAS.
>>
>>  From what I understand, I can use MPlayer for most of it.
>> I've taken note of a few MPlayer commands that I found to grab stuff that
>> I
>> will be needing.
>>
>> For getting information about the audio track, subtitle tracks and
>> chapters:
>> $ mplayer dvdnav://1 -identify -dvd-device ~/name_of_movie.iso
>>
>> For ripping the video:
>> $ mplayer dvdnav://1 -dumpvideo -dumpfile name_of_movie.m2v -dvd-device
>> ~/name_of_movie.iso
>>
>> For ripping the audio track 128:
>> $ mplayer dvdnav://1 -dumpaudio -aid 128 -dumpfile name_of_movie.ac3
>> -dvd-device ~/name_of_movie.iso
>>
>> My questions:
>> - Are the above the best options getting info, ripping video and ripping
>> audio?
>> - How can I dump subtitles?
>>
>> Thanks in advance,
>>
>> Cheers
>> _______________________________________________
>> MPlayer-users mailing list
>> MPlayer-users at mplayerhq.hu
>> https://lists.mplayerhq.hu/mailman/listinfo/mplayer-users
>>
>
> --
> 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"
>
> _______________________________________________
> MPlayer-users mailing list
> MPlayer-users at mplayerhq.hu
> https://lists.mplayerhq.hu/mailman/listinfo/mplayer-users


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.

Cheers,

Rui Correia