Re: [gentoo-user] HandBrakeCLI & undvd. was: Cloning movie DVDs with dd

[Neil Bothwick <neil@digimed.co.uk>]

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On Wed, 12 Aug 2009 21:05:02 +0100, Stroller wrote:

> > mplayer dvd://1 -dumpstream -dumpfile somefilm.mpeg
> 
> No point though, really, is there? I mean, I'm happy with it this way,  
> I'm not short of space, and to me that just seems to be complicating  
> things.

Well it's a one line command, no more complex than the dd you use, except
it works first time ;-)

> > However, it did download and compile a bunch of libraries that I  
> > already
> > have. Programs using their own copies of libraries is a bit Windowsy  
> > for
> > my liking.
> 
> I know. I find it more "Macintoshy" than Windowsy myself, but whatever  
> - it just feels a little dirty. I can only guess the Handbrake devs  
> did it this ways because the latest versions of media libs like these  
> aren't so well tracked by many distros, so this saves them manually  
> updating from SVN (or are the versions pinned?). Also, I think they  
> develop for Windows & that HandBrakeCLI will compile & work on that  
> platform.

There's also the way the ffmpeg API keeps changing, breaking everything
built against it :(

> > I suspect 0.9.4 will have more luck, as it uses a more standard build
> > system.
> 
> I really nope so. If I had more time I might look at the SVN & see if  
> I could hack an ebuild, but 0.9.3 is working just fine for me right  
> now.

I didn't bother with an ebuild, it only installs one executable if you
don't build the GUI.

> Depending on how much time is available to you for ripping, and upon  
> your optical prescription &/or tolerance for video quality, you  
> probably want to look at undvd's "-2" argument & its target size  
> option. I think you can set the bitrate in undvd, but I didn't find it  
> obvious what bitrate it's using by default - thus it's not obvious  
> what bitrate to choose in order to improve quality (or by default does  
> it try to make a file that'll fit on a CD-R? I can't recall). Setting  
> a target video size is the easy way to improve video quality in undvd  
> & on a number of movies I found a 1.2gig rip indistinguishable from  
> the original DVD.

I think it uses 900 as the default bitrate, I read that somewhere in the
docs.

> If you just want the movies to play back on a Linux laptop whilst on a  
> holiday trip then this probably won't bother you at all, but if you  
> want an "archive" of your movie collection which you'll keep for  
> playback into the future then undvd isn't the best ripper. It seems to  
> me that HandBrakeCLI takes that prize, in the command-line category,  
> at least.

At the moment that's all I want, but that may not always be true, so I'd
rather find one program that addresses my current and possible future
needs, instead of having to learn a second later on. Undvd is very simple
to use, but after some playing it turns out to be too simple, I'm a
Gentoo user and therefore a control freak.


-- 
Neil Bothwick

the sum of all human intelligence is constant, only the number of humans
increases.

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