[mythtv-users] MythDVD ISO's

[Rod Smith]

On Tuesday 04 December 2007 11:42:22 John Baab wrote:
> Exactly.  I have the ISOs playing find with xine through mythvideo.  I am
> interested in an easy method of using mythdvd to rerip these ISOs to a
> lossy format when I need to free up some hard drive space.

I don't know of any way to do this from within the MythTV GUI; however, you 
can use the dvdunauthor tool (http://dvdauthor.sourceforge.net) to do the 
job:

dvdunauthor foo.iso

This creates a series of .vob files corresponding to the original video files, 
including any video files used in menus, etc. There's also a dvdauthor.xml 
file in the mix. Unfortunately, it's not quite complete; dvdauthor won't put 
it all back together again, since the XML file is missing some details 
(button definitions, IIRC). For your purposes, though, it should be fine. 
You'll need to use some other transcoding program to resample and further 
compress the files, if that's your goal.

Note that dvdunauthor dumps the files in your current directory, so you should 
probably cd into an empty directory before you use it. You'll also need to 
figure out what each file is manually (say, by playing it in mplayer).

In theory, you could use dvdunauthor in a script along with ffmpeg, mencoder, 
or some other tool to re-encode the files to another format; however, your 
script might need some help identifying which .vob files to process, once 
they're ripped. OTOH, just processing everything over a certain size would 
probably get the files you're interested in and omit the menus.

-- 
Rod Smith
http://www.rodsbooks.com