[mythtv-users] slightly OT: creating a video on demand library

[Matt Garman]

On Sun, Jan 09, 2005 at 08:30:41PM -0600, Kevin Kuphal wrote:
> MythVideo can play the VOB files and, well, anything that mplayer,
> xine, or any other external player can play because it just
> executes a command-line to play each file.  What I've done is add
> the .VOB extension to MythVideo in the setup and instructed it to
> use mplayer to play them.  Works fine and once you do that they
> will be added by the video manager and managed just like AVI or
> other files.

I've noticed that, but I was hoping I could do some kind of
"transform" on the DVD contents to make it more intuitive as to what
they are.

For example, I have The Simpsons Season 5 DVDs, which I copied to my
hard drive.  Using mplayer from the commandline, I found that some
of the VOB files are not needed, e.g., some are just the FOX logo,
some apparently contain the menu(s), etc, etc.  What I'd like is to
just have a collection of files, along the lines of
"episode_20_episode_title.[vob|mpg|avi]".  I don't really care what
the extension or format is, so long as I can play it :)  But I would
like to trim out all the non-essential items to conserve disk space
and make the file structure as clean as possible.

For what it's worth, all the videos will reside on a server, with
the storage directory exported via NFS and Samba.  This way, I can
access the videos from any computer in the house, not just from the
MythTV box.  This is why I'd like to use the filesystem itself to
organize the files.

Perhaps another way to look at it is this: there's several ripper
programs for CDs (such as grip), which will copy, encode, connect to
CDDB, rename, create playlists, etc, automatically; it would be nice
to have an analogous program for DVDs, or at least a well-defined
process for how to achieve such a result.

Anyway, thanks again!
Matt

-- 
Matt Garman
email at: http://raw-sewage.net/index.php?file=email