DVD Shrink - Been asked, but never answered

Hey cadj, I'm assuming that you set up your dvd-rom to be accessed like a hard drive to get around the aspi error that pops up otherwise. I'm assuming that b/c I had the same problem. The key, though, is to leave it as a cdrom drive and change the windows emulation type to winxp, as dlanor78 stated.

[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).

Hopefully that helps. I don't think anything else is too picky, so let me know if that doesn't work. I didn't use any of the native linux stuff b/c it all only copies the main feature, but no special features or anything else, but dvdshrink copies anything you want it to. Good luck.

-Knappster

I set the drive back to the "cdrom type" and changed the windows version to winxp, now when i open the cd i get
"cant open d:\, invalid handle" or something like that (im not at my linux box) i have allso added d:\\ to my path but not avail.

im downloading and compiling the lastest version of wine when i get home, ill see if that helps

--EDIT
Failed to read file M:\

Invalid Handle

i must note that my wine config is using

[Drive M]
"Path" = "/mnt/cdrom"
"Type" = "cdrom"
"Label" = "CD-ROM M"
"Filesystem" = "win95"
"Device" = "/dev/cdrom"

<cut short>

"Windows" = "winxp"

i dont have anything in /home/cadj/.wine/dosdevices, could this have something to do with it. if so how do i set the symlinks up

Its ok, i got it working

installed wine 20040813 rpm for mandrake 10

configured the symlinks in /home/cadj/.wine/dosdevices

ran DvdShrink.exe "d:"

works well, just as fast as windows is seems

thanks guys for all the help,

there are heaps of people out there who want to do the same as what i have just done. its allmost worth setting up a tutorial to do so. what do u think

ok guys i have been pointed to this post and have been reading everything you guys have posted i too am a dvdshrink user on windows box but i have since set up a second pc to try and learn some linux, i think to make things easier on all of you u might want to look into a program called lxdvdrip it has all the pieces that yall mention here....vamps and so forth well you have to load its dependents but after that its a pretty simple process, i thought that i wanted to run shrink with wine in my suse system but after all the problems posted here makes me think i will just send a huge donation to the author of lxdvdrip (lol) all i need now is a GUI and Icon and i am in lala land.thanks for the oppurtunity to post.

Nrmf

Nrmf, unless things have changed since I looked at it a month or so ago, it does not have all the features of DVD Shrink. Mainly, it only copies the main feature, no menus, no special features, etc. Those are important to me, so I won't switch over to lxdvdrip until it allows you to copy everything. Maybe I'll work on a tutorial for DVD Shrink in wine when I get a chance, but it's really only one major step. But I guess it's a little more difficult if you're starting the wine installation from scratch. We'll see.

i see ypur point, i have forgotten that eveyones needs are different when it comes to dvd copying ....i'm doing a fresh install of suse pro 9.1 now and will try the wine with shrink option, do you know if it works with the latest dvdshrink 3.2.15 or will i have to use a different version. can you repost or tell me again how to get wine and shrink to work together. thank you gain.

I'm using DVDShrink 3.2.0.15 currently. I'll try to come up with a quick tutorial thing to tell you how to do it in a few hours. You do have to be somewhat patient with it, because it tends to freeze at certain points, but they can usually be avoided. I've noticed that if you mouseover specific things after it analyzes then it will freeze, but if you open DVDShrink and that DVD again it has the analysis saved, so you don't have to wait through it again, plus it doesn't tend to crash when you mouseover the same stuff. Anyway, I gotta get going, good luck.

-Knappster

Here is a tutorial to the best of my knowledge of how to get DVDShrink to work without the ASPI error in Linux using Wine. I am using version 20040716(Which means that it was created July 16, 2004). It should work on all versions at least this recent, and probably some older ones. But here if you follow these steps it should work.

If you have a version that is 20040716 or higher, or you would like to try it with your version without updating, skip to step 3. If you don't have any version of Wine currently installed, skip to step 2. You can find your version by opening an xterminal window and typing

wine --version

You can download wine source files or particular distribution installation files at http://www.winehq.com/
(I would recommend the source files just because).

Step 1: Uninstall your current version of Wine.

If you used an RPM, you have to find the rpm name of it somehow, probably something like wine-200xxxxx, I honestly don't remember how it was named. Then type

rpm -e wine-200xxxxx

or whatever the rpm name is.

If you used a debian package, you should just be able to type

dpkg -r wine

(I think).

Other distros have to figure it out for themselves because I'm a linux n00b myself and have only used those 2(and my experience with them is quite limited as well)

If you installed from source, it will be trickier. If you still have all the compiled stuff, you should be able to enter that directory and type

make uninstall

If you do not, you will probably need to download the source of the same version you had, and I don't know a whole lot about this stuff, but I assume you'll have to compile it again, make the install file, then run make uninstall, so something like this.

./compile
make
make uninstall

Don't take my word for it, cause I'm just guessing, but even though it takes forever to compile, it should uninstall your version of Wine.

Step 2: Download and install the newest version of wine.

You can get the newest version of wine at http://www.winehq.com . I will only walkthrough how to install the source tarball, because it should be the same for all distros. Also, I am going to give an example with the newest version available at this time, but all you have to do is change the numbers to what you have and it should work as well. Once you have downloaded the file, type

gunzip Wine-20040813.tar.gz
tar -xf Wine-20040813.tar

and it should create a directory named wine-20040813 (with a lowercase 'w' I think), and this directory is full of goodies. But don't touch any of them lol. Type

cd wine-20040813/tools
./wineinstall

And it should compile, make, and make install everything for you. I'm pretty sure you can run it as a regular user and when it gets to a certain point it asks for your superuser password, so just follow the directions. Congratulations, now you have wine installed.

Step 3: Configure wine.

Go to your home directory and type

cd .wine/dosdevices

Assuming your dvd drive is mounted as /mnt/dvd, and you want windows to read it as drive X: then type

ln -s /mnt/dvd X:

where /mnt/dvd is where your dvd read drive is mounted and X: is the drive you want windows to read it as. Next backup your config file, type

cd ..
cp config config.bak

This way if anything goes terribly terribly wrong(which it shouldn't) you can just replace config with the backup file. Next, use your favorite text editor(gvim in my case) to edit the config file, I will use vi, which comes pretty much standard on every linux distro. Type

vi config

and you'll see plenty of jumble. Use the down arrow, or 'j' key to scroll down the file. Until you see something like this:

[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"

With the cursor over the semicolon at the beginning of

;"Windows" = "win98"

press x to delete the semicolon. Then press the right arrow key or 'l' to scroll right until your cursor is on the 'w' in "win98". Press 'd' then 'w' to delete win98. Then press 'i' to insert and type winxp. Press escape to get out of insert mode, then ':wq' followed by enter to save and exit the file. If you screw up somewhere along the way, you can quit without saving by typing ':q!' and pressing enter and then opening the file and starting over again. If you want to save without quitting, you can type ':w' followed by enter and look around or make other changes.

Step 4: Install and run DVDShrink.

You can download the newest version of DVDShrink from: http://www.dvdshrink.org . The newest version currently out, which is the same version that I have installed, is 3.2.0.15. Once you have downloaded it, I would move it to your emulated drive c, by typing:

mv dvdshrink32setup.exe ~/.wine/drive_c

Then run the installation file by typing,

wine dvdshrink32setup.exe

and it will bring you to a Windows installation thing. Follow the clicks and points as you would in Windows to do the installation. Once it is installed, you can run it by typing:

cd ~/.wine/drive_c/Program\ Files/DVD\ Shrink
wine DVD\ Shrink\ 3.2.exe

My first point of advice is to click edit, preferences, then uncheck the box that says "Run analysis and backup in low priority mode to improve multi-tasking" which will probably double or quadruple the speed of backing the DVD up. Then make sure your DVD drive is mounted in linux and click on the Open Disc button, and if you have a DVD in it should show the drive letter and the title of the DVD. Once you click ok, it will do like a 2 minute analysis of the DVD and then show you what it's keeping and what it's not, the compression rate, etc, etc. If everything is still blank, then it's prolly just a slight but you can fix by clicking view, toolbar, then view, toolbar again. It should show up after the first time you click view, toolbar, but you'll probably want the toolbar back, hence the second time. I often have a problem with my DVDShrink freezing after the first analysis. It takes me to the debug thing in the terminal window. Either type quit, or press ctrl+c to close it altogether. One seems to flood the window with debug screens while the other works, but I can't remember which is which. If your window gets flooded, close it and open your system manager to end or kill wine. Then simply open DVDShrink the same as before, Open Disc the same as before, it won't analyze it again, since it already has that information, and it should work smoothly from there. If you would like to add or remove any tracks, do so by checking the boxes. Click backup to actually do the compression, change any settings you want(I generally save it as an ISO rather than vob files) and click OK or whatever it has. That should be it. If you save it as C:\xxxxxxx.iso then it will be in your ~/.wine/drive_c directory.

CONGRATULATIONS! You can now Backup DVDs using DVDShrink in Linux. If you turn off low priority mode, I have found that it generally takes about 30 mins to backup. I tried to make this tutorial as clear as possible, but if you have any further questions, other people prolly have the same ones, so please post them on here. Maybe sometime I'll talk to the admins about posting it as a tutorial if I get time and get any kinks worked out. Good luck and hopefully it works as well for everyone else as it does for me.

-Knappster

Thank you for you help everything works except I cant find my dos devices wine20040914 so when I open disk I have no disk I hate to ask you to hold my hand through this but I am very new this. wine20040914 is in my home directory but I can't seem to set up my dvd drive.

Forget using WINE to run DVDShrink. Use mplayer's mencoder to copy the vob files. Then use ffmpeg to recompress them at a lower bitrate. If you do not want to do that, try VMware. It works with DVD drives, but you will have to install Windows in VMware. VMware needs atleast 512 megabytes of RAM and a atleast PIII 700 MHz. If your system has these requirements or better, VMware will run fine.

knappster, you are off on compling instructions for WINE.

./configure
make depend
make

Then as root or su "make install".

After that, log in as a normal user. Next type "wine notepad". WINE will find out if you have ~/.wine directory. If you already have .wine, you probably want to rename the ~/.wine directory to ~/.wineold. If WINE finds out you do not have ~/.wine, it will create it and then it will continue running notepad. If you see notepad, then you have WINE working. You can then continue pulling your hair by configuring WINE to run desire Windows programs.

Be carful with WINE. WINE is vulnerable to spyware, viruses, and any problems that Windows has. Like Windows, WINE has a registry. Like any registry, it can be tweaked or edited by any program. The program can add a line to run a torjan or something else

Sorry, but that's rubbish. Wine does not process bootup keys in the registry so how would it "run a torjan"?

Wine is no more dangerous than Firefox is. If you run virus infected binaries via it, you may get something - surprise surprise the same is true of infected Linux binaries.

Torjans can also be implanted on a dll file. If the dll file is loaded (most likely), the torjan will run with it. Also if WINE is ran in server mode, the risk of getting a virus is very, very high.

Like many other programs in Linux, Firefox is open source. You have the option to compile it or use the binary. A virus will not go far in Linux because many files and directories have strict permissions.

windowized, open a terminal window as a regular user. It should open in your home directory, but just to be sure type

cd ~

then, type

cd .wine

as far as I know, if you type

ls

dosdevices should be listed.
so type

cd dosdevices

then, if your dvd player mounts in /mnt/cdrom
type ln -s /mnt/cdrom X:
where X is the drive letter for Wine's purposes. Then, be sure to mount the drive before starting up DVD Shrink. If you follow those steps, I think it should work. If you don't have a dos_devices directory in your .wine directory I'm not sure what to think. If that is the case you should probably make a new post regarding that and someone else will probably be able to help. The one thing you might be able to do is open the .config file in the .wine directory and try to add a device, but that's somewhat more complicated and I don't know if it makes any difference in the newer versions of wine.(BTW I'm still using the same version I listed in the tutorial, so you might have better luck if you download that version) Good luck.

Now onto you Electro...
1)
It is now recommended to install wine with the installer that's packaged with it(Or at least that was the case when I did it this summer). It worked for me, whereas the .compile, make, make install did not.

2)
As far as I am aware, VMWare costs money, but Wine is free. If you're just going to use it for this purpose, why pay for a bloated product that a free product can do just fine?

3)
I do not see how your virus/spyware comments apply to this situation since it is running a program that does not access the Internet, and even if a trojan were to be downloaded, as far as I can tell, it would only affect what you do in wine, so if you're not browsing in wine, then it shouldn't matter, right?

4)
I think from what I've read Mencoder can be kinda tricky to get going and dvdbackup can take longer to rip .vob files than DVDShrink takes to rip and compress them.

5)
Good point about notepad. That's a good way to test to make sure that wine was installed properly.

Thanks for your feedback, and let me know if any of my statements were incorrect.

-Knappster

It is now recommended to install wine with the installer that's packaged with it(Or at least that was the case when I did it this summer). It worked for me, whereas the .compile, make, make install did not.

Where did you read that. I read the documentation and it said
./configure
make depend
make
make install

I did the above just fine on several computers. You can not skip "make depend". If you skip "make depend", WINE will have a segmentation fault.

As far as I am aware, VMWare costs money, but Wine is free. If you're just going to use it for this purpose, why pay for a bloated product that a free product can do just fine?

Yes, when you combine the time it takes to reboot into Windows or configure WINE, VMWare compensates for it being costly and it is very, very reliable. All USB and Firewire devices works in VMWare if you setup a virtual machine and installed Windows on that VM. With VMWare you can use or test just about any x86 OS before putting it in real environments. I paid the $300 and it is well worth it.

I do not see how your virus/spyware comments apply to this situation since it is running a program that does not access the Internet, and even if a trojan were to be downloaded, as far as I can tell, it would only affect what you do in wine, so if you're not browsing in wine, then it shouldn't matter, right?

When you use something like games, Internet Explorer, Outlook Express, Outlook, the problems of Windows comes to surface. WINE by default sets some drives to point to /. This is very risky.

I think from what I've read Mencoder can be kinda tricky to get going and dvdbackup can take longer to rip .vob files than DVDShrink takes to rip and compress them.

On my computer, mencoder is ran almost every day like a DVR. I wrote a bash script to simplify the syntax so I can use it with crontab to record TV shows. You can write a bash script that does the converting automatically with ffmpeg to fit on a 4.5 GB disc. I do not suggest using mencoder to recompress mpeg because it has poor support for that. There are frontends but where is fun in that.

I do not suggest using WINE if its the first few months using Linux. This is because WINE can be hard to run certain programs and you are most likely to revert back to Windows if you can not setup WINE properly. I suggest getting yourself comfortable in Linux by using bash commands, writing bash scripts, and understand how Linux works. There are many programs in Linux that does the samething as DVDShrink and some of them does their job to well.

mencoder - Great video capture from a V4L or V4Lv2 compatible video capture card. Very fast AVI encoding performance. Poor mpeg encoding performance.
transcode - A great tool to convert one video format to another video format. Also it can do some editing.
ffmpeg - Same as transcode but it is designed for speed. It has many predefine settings for VCD, SVCD, and DVD.

For any program, you will have to find out what settings works best for your computer and DVD player.

All the three can decrypt the VOB file from a DVD if they are compiled with CSS support.

Electro,
If you extract the wine tarball and check out the README file, under the 2nd point, starting at line 13, you will read:

2. QUICK START Whenever you compile from source, it is recommended to use the Wine Installer to build and install Wine. From the top-level directory of the Wine source (which contains this file), run: ./tools/wineinstall

And that is where I read it. I would not recommend VMWare to someone who was going to use it JUST for this. $300 is a lot of money to backup DVDs. If you're paying $15 per DVD you could buy duplicates of 20 DVDs instead of paying for VMWare. I was giving a tutorial on how to setup DVDShrink in Wine, and it works. Sure, paying for VMWare and setting it up can do the same job and much much more, but it is not the most feasible option.

When you use something like games, Internet Explorer, Outlook Express, Outlook, the problems of Windows comes to surface. WINE by default sets some drives to point to /. This is very risky.

Again, I was explaining how to use DVDShrink in wine, not Internet Explorer, games, etc. There would be different settings in order to get those to work, and so setting up DVDShrink in the manner I explained will not make them susceptible to viruses, spyware, etc.

I am still fairly new to linux myself, so I do not have experience with bash scripts, so I am going to request something from you. You said:

You can write a bash script that does the converting automatically with ffmpeg to fit on a 4.5 GB disc.

I believe you, but I haven't the slightest idea how to do it. So if you could write a tutorial on how to write and execute a bash script, specifically for ffmpeg, I would be delighted. And I'm serious about that. What other dependencies are necessary, how long will it take to execute, do you need to rip the .vob files to the HD first, etc. I am very interested to learn and I think it would be great to have a completely linux native way of doing this. Also, I would like all menus, languages(digital 5.1 is optional), and special features included. I will browse the forums to find more information if I get time, but I look forward to learning from you.