Bruno Buys,

I am glad it worked.

I am also pretty sure dvdbackup would work just fine if you ripped only the main movie title with it like so:

This is the command to backup everything on the DVD:

dvdbackup -M -i/dev/dvd -o/my/dvd/backup/dir/

You can'T do that with my guide, instead you have to rip only the main title so you pass options to dvdbackup to rip only the main feature: (these are from dvdbackup readme file)

Dvdbackup should find the main movie by himself but if you want to see what is on the DVD and choose for yourself what you will rip you can do that like this to gather info about the dvd:

dvdbackup -i /dev/dvd -I


One question for you. When you say :

Do you mean that you have a 16:9 television set at home and you want to watch the movie on it or do you mean you want to watch it on a 4:3 TV with black bars added on the top and bottom Letterbox) ?

Hi!

Well, once DVD:Rip is working now, I'm not sure if I'll test dvdbackup again. Maybe...

I was trying to watch the movie on a regular tv, with bars added. Why is it, that mplayer can, but the tv can't?

Well if the movie is widescreen it should play widescreen with bars added by your player automatically as long as you told your player to do that in it's setup menu as I explained in a earlier post.

DVD players for televisions and software players on a computer are two very different beasts. Software players will play most anything perfectly and remove black bars automatically too if they are hardcoded in the image frames.

When you play the original DVD, how does it play on your TV?

Usually if you try playing a widescreen on a 4:3 wihtout tuning your DVD player for letterboxing (blackbars) your image will look squished (everything will look tall and thin). So I don't understand how you could possibly play a widescreen movie without problem without doing that.

If the original DVD disc plays fine, then the shrinked version will to. There is nothing in this process that modifies the image aspect or the ratio.

Here are 2 images to show what I mean:

Image #1

This image shows what a widescreen movie will look like on a 4:3 TV when the DVD player is not properly setup. It tries to play the movie as PAN&SCAN. Everything looks "compressed" or "squished".

http://www.videoin.org/articoli/formati/fig3.jpg

Image #2

This image shows the same movie on a 4:3 TV, but this time the DVD player was setup to play widescreen in letterbox format and the aspect ratio is perfect:

http://www.videoin.org/articoli/formati/fig4.jpg

Do you understand what I mean now?

Somtimes DVD's will contain 2 versions of a movie. The original widescreen format and the PAN&SCAN (modified to fit your screen) version. In PAN&SCAN you lose 20% of the picture on each side of the screen. I prefer the original. You have to rip the right one from the disc.

See this picture of what PAN&SCAN does:

http://www.videoin.org/articoli/formati/fig1.jpg

Compare this one with the widescreen one above and you will see how much of the image is lost.

nice guide, i'm trying it now.

where is mplex? i thought it came with mplayer, but i don't have it on my system even with mplayer installed. i'm using tcmplex -- have you seen much difference with that instead of mplex? the options are little different, no -f, etc. (what does the -f 8 do, btw?) thx

>edit: no sound!

mplex is part of the mjpegtools package.

-f 8 means format (fmt) and 8 is the DVD with NAV sectors options.

The other options are:
0 = Generic MPEG1
1 = VCD, 2 = user-rate VCD
3 = Generic MPEG2
4 = SVCD
5 = user-rate SVCD
6 = VCD Stills
7 = SVCD Stills
8 = DVD with NAV sectors
9 = DVD

Tcmplex works fine (part of the Transcode package) also but instead its options are -m for mode and the flags are:
1 = mpeg1 vbr, buffer 46Kb (*** default XVCD)
b = mpeg1 vbr, buffer 224Kb (experimental)
2 = mpeg2 vbr

What do you mean by: "no sound!" ?.

The you use the correct command? Like so to multiplex the mpeg stream and the audio:

tcmplex -o movie.mpg -i movie.m2v -p movie.ac3 -m d

Witch means: create movie.mpg from (-i) video input movie.m2v and (-p) audio stream movie.ac3 in DVD mode (-m d).

d = DVD
s = SVCD
v = VCD

So you would use -m d ase parameters for a DVD.

If anyone wants to backup the entire DVD(menus, special features, etc.) I have posted the methods necessary to get the Windows app, DVD Shrink to work in wine. Here's the link:

http://www.linuxquestions.org/questi...31#post1152931
http://www.linuxquestions.org/questions/showthread.php?postid=1152931#post1152931

It hasn't worked perfectly for everybody, but it seems that quite a few have had success with it. I know I might get some flak since it's not linux native, but it's simply the best tool for the job. It rips and compresses in the same amount of time that vobcopy rips(in my experiences), plus it only takes up the space of the compressed file.

Good luck no matter what you choose to use.

-Knappster

dvdshrink will not open an encrypted DVD. You will have to rip to disk first.

The point is to not have to use Windows apps.

Holy Cow, thats allot of work.

I use lxdvdrip to backup my DVD movies, it also is a 7 step process,

1) Insert DVD movie

2) click icon on desktop, or open terminal and run lxdvdrip

3) go get a cup of coffee

4) browse linuxquestions while ripping

5) insert blank DVD when the movie DVD is ejected

6) Open Xine

7) Play newly created backup.

In all sincerety, go get a copy of lxdvdrip, and read the instructions for dependencies http://developer.berlios.de/projects/lxdvdrip/

I have found that mplayer, libdvdcss, streamdvd, and dvdread from source are about all it requires, set up the lxdvdrip.conf file and live happily ever after.

My wife was very found of DVDXCopy Express in windows, because it was a three click afair, she likes lxdvdrip even better because it is a "one" click afair.

I simply created a shortcut on my desktop, she pops in the movie, clicks the icon, and pops in a blank when the movie is ejected. Thats it nothing else to do. I think my 3 year old grandaughter could use this application once it is set up.

Wrong, I've done it many times.

I understand that for some people, they would rather use a linux native for a job, even if it performs slightly worse/has less features than a windows program. I just wanted to point out that to a lot of people, DVD Shrink is the best tool for the job. It can work practically flawlessly in linux using wine(even open and rip encrypted DVDs).

I heard about lxdvdrip over the summer, but I haven't used it yet. Unless they've changed it, it only rips the main feature and none of the special features which is not what I want. From what I've heard, I agree that it's a great program, but it doesn't do exactly what I want. DVD Shrink does. If lxdvdrip will do an entire dvd rather than just the main feature, please correct me. I would gladly use a linux native program if it would just do what I wanted it to. Until then, I feel no shame in using a Windows program in wine.

There are many options out there, people can decide for themselves what is best for them. I just wanted to throw another option out there.

-Knappster

lxdvdrip now includes other utilities for menus and subtitles, I have no need for them so I can't say whther or not they are reliable.

I jump at the chance to remove all the junk and have just the movie, I buy a movie to watch the movie. lxdvdrip rips the movie and burns it all in one simple process.

As long as there are choices for everybody's tastes, I am happy.

Knappster,

Can you share how you got it working in wine to rip encrypted DVD's?

I have gotten DVDShrink to work in linux with wine however I have to rip the files to HD first using vobcopy. After that, I can point DVDShrink to the directory that I ripped the files to using the command line.

Hey dcarlson,

I spelled out everything that I did in this post . If you type it should take you to your wine directory. Then open the file named "config" and there should be a line that says:delete the semicolon and change win98 to winxp. So it should read:If that doesn't do it then read through my entire post that I linked up there. If you're just getting the ASPI error, this should do the trick. I think I have heard of incidents where people were only having problems reading encrypted DVDs, but I have never had that problem. If that's the case, you might just want to
a) re-install wine if you're only using it for DVD Shrink.
b) check how your dvd rom drive is mounted and make sure it's not mounted as a hard drive(in your config file)

Good luck and make sure to check out the link I posted if you continue to have problems.

-Knappster

Great thread guys! I finally got dvdshrink working under wine. I'm getting the ASPI error as well and just used dvdbackup for the dvd rip. I'll try knappster's fix tonight. I'm also going to give lxdvdrip a whirl as well. I prefer just ripping the movie with the least amount of compression on my backups. lxdvdrip sounds like it might be perfect for me, especially with a 1 click shortcut as described by BruceCadieux. I'll let you know how it goes.
Thanks

[root@kmberry 002]# tcextract -i movie.vob -t vob -x mpeg2 > movie.m2v
tc_memcpy: using mmxext for memcpy
[root@kmberry 002]# tcrequant -i movie.m2v -o shrinked.m2v -f 1.5
tcextract -i movie.vob -a 0 -x ac3 -t vob > movie.ac3
tc_memcpy: using mmxext for memcpy
mplex -f 8 -o final.mpg shrinked.m2v movie.ac3
INFO: [mplex] mplex version 1.6.2 (2.2.3 $Date: 2004/01/13 20:45:26 $)
**ERROR: [mplex] Unable to read from movie.ac3.

tcextract cannot extract the audio from the vob made using dvdrip. The vob plays fine with sound using mplayer.