[mythtv-users] video formats

[Christopher Kerr]

On Wed, Jul 28, 2010 at 10:15 PM, Tim Coote <tim+mythtv.org at coote.org> wrote:
> Hullo
>
> I've got a separated mythtv frontend/backend based on a couple of acer revo
> boxes + fedora 12 standard packages (mythtv 0.23). These devices don't have
> dvd drives, so I'm ripping on macs and pulling the files into the startup
> directory for mythvideo.  For some dvds I can just copy across the VIDEO_TS
> directory and all's well (once I installed the libdvdcss package, which was
> non-trivial to work out as a necessary component). For others this doesn't
> seem to work, so I'm ripping the dvds to mpeg ts encapsulated video stream
> using vlc, ignoring the dvd menu and just playing the video. However, when I
> rip like this, I get a 6GB file (clumsy to move around the house) and the
> forward / backward arrows just crash the internal video player.
>
> Should I be using a different encoding and/or encapsulation?  Or is this a
> known bug (I've seen something that may relate to left/right arrow in video
> playback.
>
> It would help me if I understood how to pull out small segments of a dvd, to
> run tests on, if that's possible, so that I don't spend a couple of hours
> ripping/transferring before I realise that I've got the wrong format. Is it
> possible to pull of bits of a dvd - I cannot seem to just transcode the VOB
> files, for instance, as these do not play back reliably.

I think most of us are now using MakeMKV - just google it, it's a free
tool which can take a title from a DVD, ISO or VIDEO_TS folder and
remux it into an MKV which works perfectly in the internal player.

- Chris