How to rip DVDs with Linux

[elfs]

Last night, I wanted to watch The Peacemaker, the George Clooney/Nicole Kidman action film about a White House nuclear weapons specialist and a US Army Colonel in the intelligence business tracking down stolen Soviet-era bombs. It's a fairly good film, although the director makes the same mistake here that we see in the Sandra Bullock/Keneau Reaves vehicle Speed: the last battle, in order to have the face-to-face confrontation, happens on foot. This after a harrowing car chase and a ramp-up with the helicopter on the bridge scene, makes the last scene a bit of a let-down.

Anyway, here's how to rip. (Yes, I own a copy of the DVD. This is perfectly legal, I don't intend to share this with anyone.) First, you have to identify what channel to rip. That's actually fairly easy. Issue the following command:

mplayer dvd:// -identify -novideo -nosound

You'll get a lot of spew, including something that looks like this:

ID_DVD_TITLE_1_LENGTH=7428.200 
ID_DVD_TITLE_2_LENGTH=342.100 
ID_DVD_TITLE_3_LENGTH=66.000 
ID_DVD_TITLE_4_LENGTH=154.333

You see that one at the top, the longest at 7428 seconds? It's a good bet that the longest title is your movie. Your title number is 1.

So now that you know which title is the movie, you have to issue the following command:

mencoder dvd://1 -quiet -ovc x264 -x264encopts "bframes=3:bitrate=1000:deblock=1,1:keyint=90:me=hex:nr=20:partitions=p8x8,b8x8,i8x8:ref=3:subme=3:trellis=2:vbv-bufsize=1100:vbv-maxrate=1250:no-dct-decimate:no-chroma-me:level=3.1" -alang en -oac mp3lame -lameopts br=96:cbr:vol=6 -vf softskip,harddup -mc 0 -o Peacemaker.mp4

The "1" in the "dvd://1" is the title number. This command is almost exactly like the command I gave you back in January, but it includes two new arguments: "-vf softskip,harddup -mc 0." These force mencoder to work harder to make sure that video and audio sync up. You encode will take a little longer, but the quality will be much better.

Comments

[ewhac.livejournal.com]

Where'd you snarf the H.264 encoding options?

If you have ffmpeg installed, you'll usually find a bunch of files in /usr/share/ffmpeg containing canned presets for various encoding qualities and viewing targets.

[elfs.livejournal.com]

I don't honestly recall. I've had them for a while now. And yeah, while I like ffmpeg, mencoder is a much more familiar tool to me. I've been hacking mencoder/mplayer for years.