I've been trying to put my dvd film collection onto my hard drive to playback from there. I just want them saving as files I can playback in kaffeine or totem.
So far I've had little or no success.
I've been using both suse 10.1 and kanotix and here are the results so far:

dvdrip - about 30 minutes to do the rip then when encoding it says 56 minutes remaining and 7 hours later it was still saying 45 minutes remaining but the progress bar was only at about 5 percent so I cancelled.

dvd rip-o-matic - Says it's completed almost instantly and doesn't actually create any files.

k9copy - Gets to 100% but fails with an error about mkisofs and that it can't find the audio_ts and video_ts directories but it does create them.

k3b - The ripping part seems to go ok but when I try to encode it completes instantly and creates a 2kb .avi which isn't much use to anyone.

acidrip - This is the only one I've had any success with at all but still not good. It creates the movie file but one film played back in German and another played back in English but had subtitles which couldn't be turned off. The video quality on both was very bad and blocky.

With all the apps tried I have read up on the required dependencies and have everything I need installed and dvd's play from the dvd player fine.
Now I don't believe that all these apps are just crap or don't work so I assume there's something wrong on my side configuration-wise or I'm doing something wrong but I don't know what.

I've tried the various apps on 4 different dvd's so far, all originals, no copies.

So how do I computerise my film collection without having to resort to using windows which I haven't needed to use for anything in well over a year?

Just copy the vobs and use mplayer to watch them ;}


Cheers,
Tink

That isn't really satisfactory.
For one, I hate using mplayer with it's floating player window.
For two, I want something along the lines of amarok where it has a playlist of all my music files but with kaffeine and movies instead. It should be possible..

I don't quite get it... Is it mandatory for you to encode your DVDs, or you just want to "copy" them to your hard drive? Haven't used totem or kaffeine, to be honest with you... but why don't you simply create an .iso image of the DVD on you hard drive and add an entry in /etc/fstab, which will allow you to mount the .iso image at will (using the "loop" option), and then play it as real DVD? You may also try using "mencoder" for this purpose...

I just want all my dvd's in a directory together so I can play them at will in kaffeine.
I could do what you say with making isos but with the amount of dvd's I'm wanting to put on that's a hell of a lot of fstab entries.
I don't understand why it's so difficult to do what I'm wanting. I generally find most things are just as easy if not easier to do in linux than windows but this seems to be a major exception.

Well, I could step in and say that I have DVD-Rip working very well in
Slackware, and acidrip (which actually uses mplayer/mencoder) in ubuntu,
but that's not going to help you. And since you don't seem to take any
diagnostic steps but move on to the next tool mplayer seemed like the
logical next step.


Cheers,
Tink

Doesn't make much sense that the number ('hell lot of') of /etc/fstab entries can be a bigger problem than the disk space consumption... but, hey, do whatever makes you happy...

@ hans21
Are you saying copying the dvd's as isos takes up less disk space. What would the difference be roughly?

@ Tinkster
I have vector (slackware based) installed and I haven't tried copying from there so I might give it a go.
It's not a case of not doing diagnostics. I have never tried copying a dvd in linux so I tried installing a few different tools to try out and see which I liked best.
k3b seems the nicest to use so that would be my preferred method.
I've been googling around but it doesn't seem like anyone's having the same problems I am so as I said before I'm tending to think I'm doing something wrong but I'm still googling..

If you just want to copy the contents of a DVD to your local computer without creating an ISO image, you can probably just use the tool called "dvdbackup." Have you tried it by any chance?

Noo, of course not! At least, I'm not familiar with it... Just don't understand why is it such a problem to implement the solution I offered? Too many 'fstab' entries hardly sounds like a viable argument. The solution to what You want to do just doesn't get any simplier than that (of course, unless You want to encode/compress all your DVD-s - something You haven't specified). Ripping DVDs sounds OK, if You don't want to create images - and K3b is the right tool for this.

The biggest problem with the iso thing that I can imagine is having to mount the individual films each time you want to play them. Now that's not such a big deal to me but to the missus, who doesn't know what an iso is, let alone how to mount one, it is quite a big deal.
I'm sorry if I'm misunderstanding what you are suggesting but she will not do anything that involves having to type commands or a lot of messing around trying to do something. She wants to click it and it happens.
This is something I have spent a lot of time with on kanotix, I have set up everything so that it is as easy as possible to do what she wants to do and that's the main reason I'm trying to do what I'm trying to do.

So here is exactly what I'm wanting, I thought I had specified this in my first post but looking back on it I see I didn't.

With our music cd's I used grip to do the business and this left us with a directory full of .mp3 files. I then simply pointed amarok to this directory and we can just open up amarok, select a song or album and listen to it.

This is exactly what I'm trying to do with the dvd's. Use a program to copy the dvd's to movie files (presumably .avi) which would go in a directory together and we can then point kaffeine to this directory and when one of us feels like watching a film we simply open kaffeine, select a film from the playlist and watch it.

Around a year ago I had a directory full of playstation2 trailers which I pointed kaffeine to and it all worked fine so the only problem is getting the films from the dvds to the hard drive as movie files.

I realise it might have been more helpful if I had put that in the first post as I thought I had so apologies for that.
around

To copy to an ISO is easy:Xine and some other players are able to play directly from the image without mounting! Try it.

Understand Your misery... :-) If you make .iso images, automount them on system start-up by adding entries in 'fstab', create a directory for each movie (on which the .iso-s will be mounted)... all what would it take for Your missus afterwards is to change (whenever she wants to watch another movie) an entry in Xine player (the best player for DVDs I've ever seen), 'settings/media/deviceUsedForDVDPlayback', which is in the bottom of the 'media' tab (she doesn't even have to scroll down the tab). Then just change the movie title (not the entire directory path, presuming You've placed all the mount points in the same directory). It can get even easier if you have a very simple GUI which would make everything possible just by clicking.

Hope this helps... I'd really like to help You with amarok, kaffeine, or totem, but since I don't use these player, I can't.

cat /dev/hdc > filename.iso gave me an input/output error but after disabling dma it worked unfortunately the resulting file size was 7GB which is a bit higher than I had hoped.
Since disabling dma I've tried the ripping apps I mentioned before and they are still failing. I've messed with the settings in acidrip and this time there were no subtitles and the playback quality was much better but not perfect. A bit more messing and I should get it ok.
Regarding the iso thing, I'm erring more in that direction now. Although the iso I copied was big, the playback quality was excellent and I found a "play iso as movie" service menu for konqueror on kdeapps.org. This allows me to right-click on the iso and play it in kaffeine. It also automatically mounts and unmounts the iso, thus doing away with the need to add anything to fstab.
I'm thinking this could work out as the simplest and quickest way of doing things if I can make a "create dvd iso here" service menu using the cat command then the missus will even be able to that side of things easily and as far as playback goes I can put a shortcut to the films directory on the desktop so she only needs to click it, go to whichever directory the film she wants is in then right-click to play in kaffeine.
So is there anything I can add to the cat command to make the filesize smaller or any other commands or apps to copy to iso. k9copy does just this but refuses to work for me and no amount of googling has found the answer to that one.

<EDIT>
Ho-hum, more problems now.
I found another app - xdvdshrink. This lets me copy the dvd as either mpeg or iso and everything is working fine.
However, when I tried to move the file from my temporary directory onto my multimedia partition it failed with "File size limit exceeded".
So I don't know what's wrong now. The file I tried to move was the mpeg at 4.1GB. All my linux partitions are ext3 and the multimedia partition is fat32. I've read something about fat32 only being able to handle a certain file size, is this the case here? If so, are there any workarounds? If not then I'm in a real pickle.

FAT32 indeed has a 4GB file-size limit. Check here

So if you don't want the quality to suffer, split the files
at e.g. 2GB size using acidrip.


Cheers,
Tink