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

[Kevin Kuphal]

Matt Garman wrote:

>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.
>
>  
>
FYI, when I rip, I only take the movie VOB.  I have one file per movie 
and that's it.  Sounds like you have complete DVD rips, which indeed you 
did mention originally.  Perhaps you would be better ripping as ISO 
files and loopback mounting them for xine/mplayer and treating them as 
complete discs rather than a collection of files.  Adding the .ISO to 
MythVideo and setting up the appropriate play script would work then.

Kevin