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knappster 07-13-2004 03:33 PM

DVD Shrink - Been asked, but never answered
 
I have read and agonized over many posts trying to come up with the most effective way to rip a dvd-9 and compress it to be burned as a dvd-5. Everybody has similar problems, but everyone with the solutions must be keeping them secret. Many people get an ASPI error with DVDShrink in wine, myself included. Some people don't, randomness makes computer interesting. The best method that I seem to have read is ripping the vob files with dvdbackup, using DVDShrink(in wine of course) to compress them into ISO format and then burn them in K3b. I was wondering if anyone who has done this would be willing to inform us how long the ripping and compressing takes on your computer(and list your computer specs).

By accident I also noticed that you can mount a cdrom as a hard drive in wine. Is it possible to skip the entire ripping process and compress the vob files using DVDShrink(in wine again) and opening the vob files on dvd player mounted as a hard drive?

Has anyone had any luck trying to rip a DVD with Smartripper(using wine) then compress the vob's with DVDShrink(in wine)? I have not searched as extensively on this topic.

I am not interested in creating divx files, etc with dvd::rip or acidrip or anything else, I simply want to compress a dvd-9 into dvd-5. I know most of these questions have been asked previously, but they have been scattered and broken and virtually unanswered. I thought it would be best to tie it into one post and get all of my questions answered together.

I plan to attempt some of the DVDShrink tricks on here either tonight or tomorrow, and I welcome any posts regarding any other linux tools or Windows tools that will run in wine, but please nothing regarding compression to divx or VCD. Depending on the response I may attempt several different approaches to this method and report my results.

I am fortunate enough to have a Windows XP installation as well where I can use DVDShrink to rip/compress a DVD in just over 30 mins. Using dvd::rip I ripped the vob files in over 2 hours with no compression and no compatibility with DVDShrink. I would like to come up with a simple, quick, and painless method to get the same thing accomplished in Linux. Hopefully there will be a strong response to this post and many people can receive help from past successes and failures.

-Knappster

m_yates 07-13-2004 04:47 PM

Well, here is what I have found:

DVDShrink will work fine in Linux on unencrypted disks, but that isn't much help to you probably. It crashes in Wine if you try to open an encrypted disk. You can test this using one of your unencrypted DVD backups if you want. I think you need to set win version to "win2k" or "winxp" in wine config to get it to work (It has been awhile so I don't remember all the details).

You use dvdbackup to get an unencrypted version of your disk on your hard drive. However, you can't just have VOB files, but instead need the entire disk structure copied. That is why you use the "mirror" option in dvdbackup:
Code:

dvdbackup -M -i /dev/dvd -o /backup/location/goes/here
Finally, you have to tell DVDShrink to open with the IFO file to get the disk structure since the menus don't work properly in DVDShrink running in wine. In your backup, look for a file called "VIDEO_TS.IFO" Then open DVDShrink with:
Code:

wine dvdshrink 3.1.exe "x:/path/to/VIDEO_TS.IFO"
Like I said, it has been some time since I tried this, so there may be some errors in the commands above, but that is generally how you do it. I have found that creating the compressed ISO is just as fast in Linux as in Windows using the same version of DVDShrink. The only extra time is in creating the backup on the hard drive. You need to have lots of free disk space and it takes about 30 minutes or so from what I remember.

As far as I know, there is no DVDShrink comparable program in Linux, which is too bad. I gave up and just run DVDShrink in WindowsXP at home. It is one of the last things I do in Windows. When dual layer DVD burners come out, all you will need is dvdbackup. Maybe someone will develop a better alternative before that happens.

By the way, if you get a Divx compatable DVD player, you can probably play mpeg-4 backups created by mencoder. I hope to get one of these players soon. Using mpeg-4, you can store 4 dvd quality movies on one DVDR disk.

knappster 07-14-2004 10:06 AM

Your post was very helpful m_yates. There was just one slight trick I noticed. My dvd player is mmounted as /mnt/cdrom. When using dvdbackup, it got an error unless I entered it as /dev/cdrom. Other than that it worked like a charm. It took about 30 minutes to rip, then 30 minutes to compress.

Do you think that ripping it with k3b would copy the entire disk structure when ripping, or would it just copy the VOB files? I might test that out again tonight and post my results.

Do you know if there are any plans to fix the ASPI problem in wine? I only ask because I could rip and compress a DVD in windows in about half the time it takes to do it in Linux.

This is a satisfactory Linux solution, but that doesn't make it the best. I'll keep you informed if I come across anything better.

-Knappster

m_yates 07-14-2004 10:44 AM

I haven't used K3b to copy disks, so I don't know. If it creates an ISO image of the DVD, you should be able to use that, provided the disk is unencrypted. Just mount the ISO image:
Code:

mkdir /mnt/mydvdbackup
mount -o loop -t iso9660 dvdImageFromK3b.iso /mnt/mydvdbackup

Then you can run dvdShrink in wine:
Code:

wine dvdshrink 3.1.exe "x:/mnt/mydvdbackup/path/to/VIDEO_TS.IFO"
The problem your likely to run into is that K3b will make a perfect copy (INCLUDING encryption), so DVDshrink will crash. It also may not save you a lot of time compared to dvdbackup. Good luck!

E Pierce 07-14-2004 11:05 AM

I never thought to use it in wine, I just assumed it would crash - thanks for the information

knappster 07-14-2004 02:00 PM

Good point about the encryption m_yates. I think I read that K3b is planning on implementing something like dvdshrink in their TODO.

Right now I'm just in the mindset that anything Windows can do, Linux can do better. Unfortunately, when it comes to this that is false.

I am starting to get the impression that dvdbackup is the fastest ripper/decrypter available and nothing can match dvdshrink as far as compression speed, even if it is run in wine.

I noticed a fairly recent post on doom9's forum where someone was looking for help designing something in Linux using python. I don't know anything about python and I'm still just getting used to Linux, but if you are interested, check out: http://forum.doom9.org/showthread.ph...inux+dvdshrink

Thanks for the help and I will let you know if I discover anything more useful.

-Knappster

m_yates 07-14-2004 04:43 PM

Thanks for the link! I had never heard of lxdvdrip. It looks like it has almost all the features of DVDshrink and can requant a DVD-9 to fit DVD-5.

See this discussion:

http://www.videohelp.com/forum/archive/t211236.html

I can't wait till I have a chance to try it out!

knappster 07-15-2004 10:12 AM

I have not tried it either, but I'm kind of turned off since it supposedly won't take the menus and extras with it. I imagine that it will eventually add that option, but until then, it's a tough sell for me.

I will try to keep an eye out for when lxdvdrip includes menus and extras, but when you get a chance to use it, I will be interested to find out how well it works.

I actually just found K3b within the last week. Up until then, I had mostly switched back to windows for burning. Are there any other utilities that are must haves for linux? For example, I have noticed that the file roller that comes with Redhat 9 is much slower than winrar in Windows. Perhaps the command line runs it faster, but is there a tool comparable to winrar in speed and options? I am still pretty new to Linux, just trying to learn it by using it. Advice is always appreciated.

-Knappster

m_yates 07-15-2004 11:39 AM

I've never used winrar, but you can make rar archives in Linux. There are programs called rar and unrar. If you run debian, you can install them with "apt-get install rar unrar". They work from the command line and I don't know how speed compares.

If I want to archive files, I usually just use Konqueror. If you open up the Koqueror file manager, then select a group of files you want to archive. Right click on them and select actions>create archive. You can create zip, gzip, or bzip archives. You can also use Konqueror to extract an archive. It beats remembering all the options like "tar -zxvf "

knappster 07-15-2004 12:31 PM

I have used the rar and unrar programs in Linux too, but there was a GUI called FileRoller, or something like that, in Redhat 9 that is very slow with large files and it also does not show a progress bar(% complete) which is one of my biggest irks. I will probably try Konquerer out tonight if I get a chance.

I was looking back at some of the posts again, and it looks like there is a way to rip and compress an encrypted dvd in wine using DVDShrink. Check out the top two posts on this page:

http://www.linuxquestions.org/questi...p&pagenumber=3

I did try just mount my cd-rom as a hard drive and it read an unencrypted DVD fine, but got an error with the encrypted ones. So if you start playing it in mplayer and pause it, then use DVDShrink, it might work. I think I'll give that a try tonight , because it seems more time efficient than anything else. If I have time I'll try to test out lxdvdrip too, and see if they have added menu support. I will try to keep you up to date.

-Knappster

knappster 07-16-2004 03:03 AM

Just to update my previous post... it appears that the mplayer trick did work! I did not go through the whole process since it is getting late, but it started without a hitch. Here is the process that I went through:

1. Mount your CD-ROM as a hard drive in wine
a)I don't know which steps are necessary to mount the drive in wine properly, but I went through 3 of them. In the config file I added:
[Drive F]
"Path" = "/mnt/cdrom"
"Type" = "hd"
"Device" = "/dev/cdrom"
"Filesystem" = "win95"

b)and then verified that my cd-rom was set up as a hard drive using winecfg
c) I also had to set up a shortcut or link or whatever to the cd-rom in a system window. Enter your ~/.wine/dosdevices directory. Then type
Code:

ln -s /mnt/cdrom F:
2. Insert DVD into DVD-ROM and mount it manually as /mnt/cdrom. Open mplayer and play DVD. I skipped to the 2nd chapter to make sure it was well into it, I don't know if it helps to go that far, but it is necessary to play the DVD to get around the encryption. Then I just paused it early in the chapter.

3. Go into your DVD shrink directory and type:
Code:

wine DVD\ Shrink\ 3.1.exe "F:"
It should start analyzing the CD right away. If you get an error message, then there's obviously a problem. I have only tried it once, and I didn't even go through the ripping/burning process, but it seemed to be functioning correctly. If anyone else has tried this, or would like to, I would love to hear some feedback as to the success rate. I have been extremely busy lately so I haven't had much time to play, but if I get a chance tomorrow I will practice on a couple DVDs or so. Hopefully this is as effective as it appears.

-Knappster

rickenbacherus 07-17-2004 08:52 AM

I happened across this which seems to be relevant:
http://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/ScriptForDvdBackup

I have however been using lxdvdrip which works quite well and is VERY fast. 1 hour on my XP2200 w/ 1G system RAM to make a complete 1:1 backup of a full length movie. That 1 hour also includes burning @ 4x. True there are as of yet no menus available but that doesn't matter to me personally.

knappster 07-19-2004 10:43 AM

I had a little bit more time to try to try the mount DVD drive as a hard drive trick for DVD Shrink over the weekend. It failed with the majority of DVDs simply because it would not compress them enough for some mysterious reason.

I haven't timed the entire process, but the dvdbackup, DVD Shrink, then burn process probably takes just over an hour on my machine. I am running an Athlon XP 2000, 512 MB RAM with a 4x burner. I would say that it takes 20-30 mins for dvdbackup, 20-30 minutes for DVD Shrink, then about 15 mins to burn. It is the most successful process that I have attempted thus far.

If lxdvdrip ever rips menus and other features, I would be very interested in tryin it. Until then, I suppose I am content to fill my hard drive temporarily. I will try to examine that script more thoroughly sometime rickenbacherus. Thanks for the comments.

dlanor78 07-31-2004 08:37 AM

Wine + dvd shrink works now!!!!
 
It works!!!! For me it did at least. No more ripping to the hard drive first either.

I'm using version 20040716 of wine and 3.17 of dvd shrink. Here's how I got a full backup to work (don't know about reauthoring yet."

In a shell, make a new dosdevice (something like "ln -s /mnt/cdrom2 /home/usr/.wine/dosdevices/e:" without quotes. Then still in shell do a wine /path/to/DVD\ Shrink\ 3.2.exe e: (or whatever path drive letter you chose). It should start analyzing your dvd now with no aspi error!!!

So far I've only tried The Count Of Monte Cristo, but will try others and report any problems. Enjoy and good luck!!! Also, report back any problems so we can try to fix them, and spread the word that dvd shrink seems to work fine now.


[Update]

Okay. tried to re-author a dvd and dvd shrink crashed. Also, just moving the window around a bit seems to crash it too. On the bright side, I just started on another dvd and it too works for a full backup.

[New Update]

Okay I'm an idiot....I totally forgot a crucial step in getting this to work. In another post I stated that you shouldn't have to touch your wine config file, but you do. In the part where it says

[Version]
; Windows version to imitate (win95,win98,winme,nt351,nt40,win2k,winxp,win2k3,win20,win30,win31)
;"Windows" = "win98"
; DOS version to imitate
;"DOS" = "6.22"

you need to remove the ; from the "Windows" = line and change win98 to winxp (others above win98 may work, but haven't tried them). After that, and after my other instructions, you should all be in business. I reinstalled mandrake from scratch and built wine from newest source. Also got newest version of dvdshrink. All working now that I made that wine config change.

knappster 08-03-2004 10:43 AM

Hey dlanor78, is that a new version of wine or dvd shrink or something? I believe I had the newest version of both when I originally posted(whenever that was).

I will try to upgrade to the newest version of both when I get home tonight. It would save a great deal of time if it worked without ripping.

Did you take any other steps not mentioned?(such as unlocking it in mplayer first, mounting it as a hard drive in the config file, etc)

At least somebody has gotten it to work. Congrats, hopefully I will have as much luck.


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