Software: Ripping DVDs in Ubuntu

As my new MythTV Box has no DVD drive, I have no choice but the rip my current DVDs to Xvid. I prefer doing this anyway, as it's easier to select what films to watch - rather than hunting through a collection. Doing this in Ubuntu turned out to be a little tricker than I was hoping, but now I have it set up - it's actually really easy.

The first problem I had, was just playing the DVDs in the first place - mainly because of the CSS encryption. I had a hunt around Synaptic and installed the relevant Gstreamer codecs for playing DVDs. libdvdread3 suggested it had support for CSS decryption - but what it doesn't tell you is that you need to run a script to get this support. This is done by running "sudo /usr/share/doc/libdvdread3/install-css.sh".

To do this, I had to install the debhelper and fakeroot packages. Then I was given an error suggesting that the C compiler could not create executables. It turns out I had a couple of packages missing, so "apt-get install libc6-dev g++ gcc" sorted me out. Then running the script worked a charm.

I then realised that I had never played a DVD on this machine, even using Windows - and that the region might not be set. So I installed the "setregion" package. Using this I set the region of my DVD drive to 2.

Finally, I was able to play DVDs, so the next stage was ripping them. I found an excellent tool called "k9copy". Which makes the whole process really simple. Not only can it do a DVD Shrink style dual layer to single layer conversion, you can also encode to Xvid, H264 and much more. Ripping to Xvid was very simple, selecting two pass Xvid, with 192kbps MP3, and a target size of 700MB and it sorted all the bitrates out for me.

On my 3GHz Pentium D, which is hardly a top spec machine, I got around 39fps, with an estimated 1h 9m for the first pass, and generally speaking I'd expect around the same for the second. That's not bad considering this is running in the background while I do other things. It is running multithreaded too, taking full advantage of my dual core architecture.

Worryingly, the preview had an incorrect aspect ratio. But the final file was correct and all was well in the world of Spode.

I might have to give that a go on a fresh install.

That doesn't look right at all. What are you using to play the DVD?

Try installing Ogle.

You say that, but I've had real issues with VLC in both Ubuntu and Fedora I've not bothered diagnosing it on this Ubuntu box - I'm just using Totem instead. Totem has a better playlist anyway.

Posted By: Spode

Try installing Ogle.

I'll try it tonight. I did get DVDshrink for Linux but it is totally different from the Windows version. I found a site that suggested using 3.2 Win version under WINE but I am not sure I would have good results seeing as how I am running a Sempron. Having to emulate plus rip at the same time does not seem like very a good combination considering my current hardware.

Well I don't know what installing Ogle has to do with Totem, but I installed it and Totem started working. It is late but I will give k9copy another go over the weekend.

Yeah, but I thought I had installed the dependencies already. On second thought, maybe that was my 6.10 install. Man, I am getting old.