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

[Rui Correia]

On Sep 10, 2017 00:29, "JD" <jd1008 at gmail.com> wrote:

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.


Hi JD,

In all honesty, I just can't see how that would work. dd is a copy command
which just copies blocks of data from an in file to an out file.
A DVD is an encrypted source. If I just run a block copy on an encrypted
file I will end up with a copied file which is also encrypted.
And that's where the definition of the word 'rip' comes to the conversation.
To me, ripping has always been the process of copying and decrypting a DVD
whereas to most people it may just be the process of copying the DVD to a
file...
Besides, I use ddrescue which does something very similar to dd but helps
getting rid of the bad sectors of ARccOS copy protection mechanism.


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.


Ok. But just a question: why would I need to use /dev/dvd?
I could just use /dev/sr0 instead, right?



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
>
>
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Thank you for your input on this subject.

Regards,

Rui Correia