Often the menus on DVDs are slow, and are getting in your way more often than not. If you are the fortunate owner of a DVD player that can display MPEG4, you can quickly select a movie, put multiple movies on a single disc, and also position subtitles completely underneath the movie.
For ripping, we reccommend using Mencoder. It is a fast, high-quality DVD ripper that works on many platforms. The only downside is that you have to know the right audio and subtitle IDs and the correct title number. This is where DVDInfo comes into play.
DVDInfo will find the longest track, and display audio and subtitle track information. This information can then be used to set the correct Mencoder options.
Download dvdinfo 1.1
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Usage
First, make sure you have Mencoder, and Python 2.4. Then, run dvdinfo:
user@host$ dvdinfo.py
==================================================
dvdinfo.py version 1.1
Sybren Stüvel <sybren@stuvel.eu>
http://stuvel.eu/dvdinfo
==================================================
Using default device: /dev/dvd
Done reading.
Longest title: 1
Chapters: 19
Audio tracks:
aid=128 lang=en fmt=ac3 (5.1)
aid=137 lang=en fmt=dts (5.1)
aid=130 lang=pt fmt=ac3 (5.1)
Subtitles:
sid= 0 lang=en
sid= 1 lang=en
sid= 2 lang=pt
sid= 3 lang=nl
sid= 4 lang=en
sid= 5 lang=pt
Using mencoder
As an added bonus, here is a method to use mencoder with the to convert a DVD movie to an MPEG4 file, using the information you found by running dvdinfo.py.
mencoder dvd://title \
-aid aid \
-sid sid \
-o output.avi \
-ovc lavc \
-oac copy \
-lavcopts \
vcodec=mpeg4:mbd=1:vqmax=10:lmax=10:keyint=130:pass \
-vf scale=720:405,expand=720:576:0:25:1 \
-ffourcc divx \
-spuaa 4 \
-channels 6
Replace title, aid and sid with the values you found by running dvdinfo.py. They represent the title number, the audio track number, and the subtitle track number.
You will have to run the above command twice, with different values for pass. This will enable two-pass encoding, which results in a higher quality and smaller file.
| Pass | Value for pass |
|---|---|
| First | vpass=1:turbo |
| Second | vpass=2 |
This will result in a movie of around 1 gigabyte, fitting four movies on a single-layer DVD-R or eight - maybe nine - movies on a dual-layer DVD-R.
Disclaimer
Stüvel IT does not want to promote illegal copying movies. DVDs are getting cheaper and cheaper, and if we all only buy DVDs from the discount selection, we'll drive the prices down even further - legally.
This guide is intended to use the advantages of MPEG4 in an easy way, by compressing your legally obtained DVDs. Of course, movies in MPEG4 also don't have those annoyingly unskippable clips or hideously slow DVD menus.