On 8/3/2011, at 6:09pm, James wrote: > ... > I have a large DVD(movie) collection, that I want > copied to hard drive(s) and a database set up > about the movies. Since disc is cheap > ($75/2TB) I'm not even going to fool around > with conversion or compression, i.e. MPEG-2 > is fine for now, unless the process can > be automated
I've started this process, and am pretty much happy with my "workflow". IMO you're absolutely right not to transcode the movies, if you can avoid it. I've wasted a lot of time trying to do that well - whilst h264 *is* really good, if you look closely picture quality is still not as good as the original and there are several other ways you can trip up when processing an even moderately large collection. DVD is a pretty whacky "standard", and I don't believe there are any transcoding tools that will be certain to get the right framerate, aspect ratio (anamorphic picture, cropping &c) and stuff like that every time. If you blindly rip anything less than the whole DVD then it's very easy to get the wrong language of audio or miss subtitles on foreign movies. An example of a movie which has caused ripping complications for me is "Killing Zoe" - it features an American protagonist but is set in Paris. It is a Hollywood movie but there are large sections of French dialogue - the American director probably wanted to give it a European "flavour" by including so much. The DVD I have of this movie has a forced subtitle only for the French parts - the film was surely subtitled like this during US theatrical release, but I had not seen it for some years when I originally ripped the disk. So thinking that "this is an English language DVD of a Hollywood movie" I just ripped audio and video exactly as I would have ripped any other US DVD at the time (for "hard subtitles" this procedure would have, in fact, been perfectly fine). Consequently the subtitles were missing, and I missed loads of context when I watched it because I don't really speak French - it was only 3/4 of the way through that I suddenly realised my mistake and that there's supposed to be subtitles for these sections. Only at that stage of the plot there was simply too much French dialogue I didn't understand. That is an example of one the most user non-optimal possible experiences from poor DVD ripping. The viewer doesn't understand the movie, but when watching it again the surprise of plot elements may be spoiled from having inadvertently watched it in the wrong language in the first place. Dramatic effect is important and, especially since DVDs allow branching (Director's Cut vs Theatrical on the same disk), there probably loads of examples where the DVD does something clever that can't be captured correctly via a conventional rip of title 1 to .mp4. These may seem like unusual cases, but it's the corner cases that get you every time; since I've found at least a couple of them whilst ripping less than 50 disks, there are probably several in any DVD collection. In one scene of the British movie "Lock Stock And Two Smoking Barrels" characters talk in cockney rhyming slang so impenetrable it's subtitled; I have no idea whether this short set of subtitles is hard or forced on the DVD. Presuming the movie also has English subtitles for the deaf, how does the DVD avoid those clashing? I don't know, but I don't want to have to care, either. One might hypothesise that the same problem might manifest during the Disney movie "Wall-E", were the beeping of one of the robots subtitled. Feel free to dismiss this problem because "that film doesn't affect me", but I'm sure you'll find a movie that does affect you, after you've ripped it. (I've just reread your original questions, and seeing your mention of asking a teenager to perform the disk-swapping, I now realise that I've probably been preaching to the converted with these last two lengthy paragraphs. However I might as well leave that commentary in the hope it'll benefit someone else some time). It's pretty common now to rip the main title to .mkv file, but I think this is still flawed. The .mkv container allows storage of the original MPEG2 video encode (quick to rip, no loss of quality) and unlike .mp4 (I think) it also permits multiple different audio tracks (director's commentary &c) and multiple subtitles. .mkv is pretty widely supported on standalone players (nearly as widely as .mp4 h264/AAC) but you still have the problem I described before that it may default to the wrong language or subs; at least in this case the viewer can select those from the player's menus themselves, but it's not as nice as the original DVD in a conventional player. You may be already past the cockney scene before you realise the subtitles are missing and have to rewind; more likely you'll just not be aware of these subtitles at all, and you'll entirely miss the point of this scene. I'm not aware of any tools which will easily "translate" from a DVD the settings for default or forced subtitles or for default audio - usually the latter is the first track, but not always. No other format will handle the DVD's original menus. Most people don't care, but you also lose extras like the "making of" video and deleted scenes when you rip a DVD to .mkv. IMO ripping the whole movie to a DVD .iso file is the optimal solution for home viewing. It's just like a perfect dd clone of the disk, except decrypted, and so open-source players can treat the file just like the original DVD. Standalone players and consumer devices do not support .iso files quite so well as they do .mp4, but there are now a good crop of great $100 set top boxes. These include a Western Digital "TV Live" and the PlayOn HD Mini [1] (I have this latter) - both of which browse to your files over network shares (e.g. Samba) and then treat them just like the original DVD, showing the GUI DVD menu. Both the Western Digital "TV Live" and the PlayOn HD Mini are in fact mini Linux boxes (MIPS, I think) with a dedicated video decoder chip. It's easy here on gentoo-user to be critical of the fact that these boxes have a proprietary closed-source driver for that decoder and that the o/s isn't really user-servicable, but it's very hard to beat them for price, performance, convenience and their lack of a fan. Ideally we might all build Linux-based home media centre PCs, but that would cost more and it is difficult to achieve such a small form-factor; it's another Linux project you could sink many hours into. These consumer players, on the other hand, are nice looking little boxes - they're tiny, with low power consumption and no fan. I can't emphasise that last point enough, because fanless on any kind of regular PC is a real PITA. Connect a consumer network video player to your network, HDMI to the TV, use the menu to browse the network and go - your video plays perfectly. Under Gentoo, ripping a DVD to .iso is very easy. It is fundamentally: dvdbackup -i /dev/sr0 -o tmpdir -M followed by: mkisofs -dvd-video -o "Movie Title.iso" -sysid '' -A '' -V $TITLE dir/VIDEO_TS As long as you have appropriate decryption (CSS) libraries installed then you'll get a perfect copy using these two commands. Actually, I'm not sure how the layer change is handled, but I can't say that it manifests during playback. The most significant caveat I can think of is that some recent DVD releases introduce artificial "scratches" to prevent copying. There are some mastering faults of this kind that mplayer and the like won't notice because they're on a part of the DVD which is never read during normal playback. I intended to take a look at the dvdbackup source code and add an option to insert zeroes instead of its current failure - erroring out with a "bad read" message; I'm pretty confident that shouldn't be too difficult, that it will fix the problem and result in a playable disk image. That got kind put on hold a while back and I haven't had a chance to look at it again since. The only other alternatives I'm aware of are to transcode (mplayer -> mp4) or use a Windows-based ripper; DVD FabDecryptor seems to work on all these disks, it offers a free trial and you can circumvent the license restrictions with ethical integrity, as its developers violate the GPL license of the ffmpeg code they use. I've got a Perl script to wrapper `dvdbackup && mkisofs`, reduce typing a little and do some error-checking. It tries to preserve some of the DVD metadata (TITLE &c), and you might find it handy if handing off disk-swapping to your teenage progeny. My script is currently too ugly for me to distribute widely - as soon as I finished I realised I want to rewrite it from scratch - but I think it's fairly robust and if you want a copy for your personal use only then email me off-list. In the next version I'd like to remove the "unskippable" flag from all titles / chapters, as it seems a little daft to have ripped all one's DVDs to a network RAID array, and yet still have to suffer the dumb FBI warnings. All the Windows rippers do this, so I assume it's possible to implement, but I have no idea how difficult. There are some questions in your original post that I haven't addressed. I don't know that there's any "perfect" solution in existence for this kind of consumer management of media files. I'm pretty sure MythTV does some clever lookup of metadata at the IMDB and adds cover art and stuff, but MythTV's focus is on TV recording(s), not DVDs; it probably handles DVDs pretty well, has a decent search and stuff, but it's a whole larger proposition than my setup, a lot more work. Besides, you can probably rip DVDs with `dvdbackup && mkisofs` and then later worry about databasing (whether by importing them in to MythTV or otherwise). HTH, Stroller. [1] http://www.playonhd.com/en/?upn=products&subpage=playonhdmini
