Re: [gentoo-user] DVD Movie backups

[David Haller]

Hello,

On Fri, 16 Dec 2011, Stroller wrote:
>On 16 December 2011, at 17:25, Mark Knecht wrote:
>> ...
>> I have no interest in tearing apart the DVD in any way. It was more
>> about the idea of a fire causing the loss of maybe $15K-$20K
>> investment over the years. I can rip all the CDs, keep the ripped
>> version here to watch on the computer, and store the DVDs elsewhere,
>> but that elimiates (generally) being able to watch special features
>> which my wife and kid enjoy.
>
>I've been down this path fairly extensively.

So have I. Um, if my index is right, about 1k-ish ;)

>Use media-video/dvdbackup and mkisofs (from app-cdr/cdrtools) to
>create .iso images of your DVDs.
>
>Store these on a Samba share, then use something like the PlayOn HD
>Mini or the Western Digital TV Live! to watch them on your big screen
>TV.
>
>These players allow you to treat .iso files on the network just as if
>they were actual DVDs and give you full access to the menus and extra
>features.

At least mplayer, vlc and xine will also happily play a directory, be
it a mounted DVD, a mounted image or just a rip as made by dvdbackup
and others (e.g. lxdvdrip).

>dvdbackup will fail on a small number of DVDs which have been
>"copy-protected" by making them non-compliant with the DVD
>specification (IMO this is fixable in dvdbackup's code), but I'm
>getting at least a 95% success rate.

See my other mail(s), finding the correct tracks with above players
and then ripping only those tracks with 'dvdbackup -t TRACKNO ...'
should get you to 99.5% or so. The rest is usually just plain broken.
So far, I've always got a result out of non-physically-defective disc
(I don't mind throwing away the menus though).

I even had the situation that trying to only play one such disc (with
xine IIRC) made my box hang up. Needed a hard reset. Weirdly enough, I
could still rip the tracks after the reboot with dvdbackup or so and
the result was ok ... Probably the (libata) IDE driver got thoroughly
screwed on that first try by whatever combination of commands and
drive reactions...

>I have found writing dual-layer DVDs practically impossible. The
>failure rate is way too high - even disks which burned "successfully"
>are unreadable on another PC / player.

I've, so far, only written data-DVD-DL, no problems with those ;)

BTW: do you reencode stuff? I use mencoder with:

-x264encopts crf=22:trellis=1:qcomp=0.8:weight_b:8x8dct:subq=6:nr=750

the resulting files are usually surprisingly small and still have a
very good quality (I can't see a difference to the original with both
unscaled on the screen (PAL-DVD, not HD ;). I have yet to try that one
on some difficuly cases though (dark scenes in a movie with fog,
panning, and movement and a quite noisy-in-the-dark series
(SG-1/S1). Might have to break out hqdn3d again for the latter.

-dnh

-- 
Rincewind shut his eyes. Inside his mind he could feel the Spell scuttling
off to hide behind his conscience, and muttering to itself.
                           -- Terry Pratchett, The Light Fantastic, p. 161