Re: [gentoo-user] Automation: Ripping DVDs to disk

[Paul Hartman <paul.hartman+gentoo@gmail.com>]

On Tue, Mar 8, 2011 at 12:09 PM, James <wireless@tampabay.rr.com> wrote:
> Hello,
>
> I have a large DVD(movie) collection, that I want
> copied to hard drive(s) and a database set up
> about the movies. Since disc is cheap
> ($75/2TB) I'm not even going to fool around
> with conversion or compression, i.e. MPEG-2
> is fine for now, unless the process can
> be automated (see schema below). Naturally
> being able to store video in different formats
> would be a big plus.
>
> I'm very flexible on the DB so any software
> package that already exists in a (gui) tool
> form, so that I can set it up with simple
> instructions for an adolescent to:
>  load the dvd
>  execute the script or simple procedure
>  wait until dvd movie is stored on disk
>  then swap out for another DVD...
>
> <rinse and repeat 500+ times>
>
>
> What software exists, or what software
> would be easy to script up such an endeavor?

Basically all of the GUI DVD-ripping/recoding software are just shells
to run the commandline tools like transcode, ffmpeg, mencoder etc.

If you find a GUI tool to do as you wish, it should be trivial to look
in its logs and see exactly which commands it ran and then put that
into a shell script for repeated usage.

Ripping the original DVD contents is the easy part (just use vobcopy),
converting it to any other format can be more tricky because you get
problems like audio and video being out of sync that sometimes can't
be fixed without manual tuning.