[mythtv-users] video formats

[Brian Wood]

On Thursday, July 29, 2010 05:37:37 pm Nick Rout wrote:
> On Fri, Jul 30, 2010 at 11:28 AM, Christopher Kerr
> 
> <mythtv at theseekerr.com> wrote:
> > 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.
> 
> Nice product but closed source and when they get out of beta I suspect
> you will have to pay for it. It may or may not be worth it.
> 
> It must check home too as periodically I get a message "this version
> is out of date, you must update" or words to that effect.
> 
> As far as just ripping a dvd, try:
> 
> mplayer dvd://n -dumpstream -dumpfile mydvd.vob
> 
> where n is the title you want to rip.
> 
> Then you can use avidemux or handbrake to transcode if desired. I
> prefer h264 in a mkv, it comes out much much smaller.



I confess I haven't been following this thread, but I just use handbrake to rip the main title from a DVD to an h264-
encoded MKV file, it even gets the chapters right.

Did I miss some problem with doing that?

I looked at MakeMkv, but having to answer "yes" to something that looked like it was written by the Microsoft Legal Dept. 
just went against the grain for a Linux application. I won't use it, especially as I have a working alternative.