Tag: dvd

MediaFork 0.8-beta1

A few months ago, I was looking for a nice usable solution to rip DVDs. I was trying out a lot of different things, but the only application that had acceptable usability and speed was HandBrake

Unfortunately, the main developer of that tool has run out of time to continue to develop HandBrake which made the project stall for some time.

Capable fans of the tool have now created a form, aptly named MediaFork and they have just released Version 0.8-beta1 with some fixes.

But that’s not all. Aside from the new release, they also created a blog, set up a trac environement.

Generally, I’d say the project moved back to be totally alive and kicking.

The new release provides a linux command line utility. Maybe I should go ahead and try it out on a machine even more powerful than my Mac Pro (which is running linux without X) – let’s see how many FPS I’m going to get.

Anyways: Congratulations to the MediaFork developers for their great release! You’re doing for video what iTunes did for audio: You make ripping DVDs doable.

DVD ripping, second edition

HandBrake is a tool with the worst website possible: The screenshot that’s presented on the index page leaves behind a completely wrong image of the application.

When you just look at the screenshot, you will get the impression that the tool is fairly limited and totally optimized for creating movies for handheld devices.

That’s not true though. The screenshot is the screenshot of a light edition of the tool. The real thing is actually quite capable and only lacks the capability to store subtitles in the container format.

And it doesn’t know about Matroska.

And it refuses to store x264 encoded video in the OGM container.

Another tool I found after my first very bad experience with ripping DVDs last time is OGMrip. The tool is a frontend for mencoder (of mplayer fame) and has all the features you’d ever want from a ripping tool, while still being easy to use.

It even provides a command line interface, allowing to process your movies from the console.

It has one inherent flaw though: It’s single threaded.

HandBrake on the other hand, can split the encoding work (yes. the actual encoding) over multiple threads and thus can profit a lot of SMP machines.

Here’s what I found in matters of encoding speed. I encoded the same video (from a DVD ISO image) with the same settings (x264, 1079kbit/s, 112kbit mp3 audio, 640×480 resolution at 30fps) on different machines:

  • 1.4Ghz, G4 Mac mini, running Gentoo Linux with OGMrip: 3fps
  • Thinkpad T43, running Ubuntu Edgy Eft, 1.6Ghz Centrino, OGMRip: 8fps
  • MacBook Pro, 2Ghz Core Duo, HandBrake: 22fps (both cores at 100%)
  • Mac Pro, Dual Dual Core 2.66Ghz, HandBrake: 110fps(!!), 80% total cpu usage (hdd io seems to limit the process)

This means that encoding the whole 47 minutes A-Team episode takes:

  • OGMRip on Mac mini G4: 7.8 hours
  • OGMRip on Thinkpad: 2.35 hours per episode
  • HandBrake on MacBook Pro: 1.6 hours per episode
  • HandBrake on MacPro: 0.2 hours (12 minutes) per episode

Needless to say what method I’m using. Screw subtitles and Matroska – I want to finish ripping my collection this century!

On an additional closing note, I’d like to add that even after 3 hours of encoding video, the MacPro stayed very, very quiet. The only thing I could hear was the hard drive – the fans either didn’t run or were quieter than the harddrive (which is quiet too)

ripping DVDs

I have plenty of DVDs in my possession: Some movies of dubious quality which I bought when I was still going to school (like “Deep Rising” – eeew) and many, many episodes of various series (Columbo, the complete Babylon 5 series, A-Team and other pearls).

As you may know, I’m soon to move into a new flat which I thought would be a nice opportunity to reorganize my library.

shion has around 1.5TB of storage space and I can easily upgrade her capacity (shion is the only computer I own I’m using a female pronoun for – the machine is something really special to me – like the warships of old times) by plugging in yet another USB hub and USB hard drives.

It makes totally sense to use that unlimited amount of storage capacity to store all my movies – not only the ones I’ve downloaded (like video game speed runs). Spoiled by the ease of use of ripping CDs, I thought, that this would be just another little thing to do before moving.

You know: Enter the DVD, use the ripper, use the encoder, done.

Unfortunately, this is proving to be harder than it looked like in the first place:

  • Under Mac OS X, you can try to use the Unix tools with fink or some home-grown native tools. Whatever you do, you either get outdated software (fink) or not really working freeware tools documented in outdated tutorials. Nah.

  • Under Windows, there are two kinds of utilities: On one hand, you have the single-click ones (like AutoGK) which really do what I initially wanted. Unfortunately, they are limited in their use: They provide only a limited amount of output formats (like no x264) and they hard-code the subtitles into the movie stream. But they are easy to use. On the other hand, you have the hardcore tools like Gordian Knot or MeGUI or even StaxRip. These tools are frontends for other tools that work like Unix tools: Each does one thing, but tries to excel at that one thing.

    This could be a good thing, but unfortunately, it fails at things like awful documentation, hard-coded paths to files everywhere and outdated tools.

    I could not get any of the tools listed above to actually create a x264 AVI or MKV-File without either throwing a completely unusable error message (“Unknown exception ocurred”) or just not working at all or missing things like subtitles.

  • Linux has dvd::rip which is a really nice solution, but unfortunately, no solution for me as I don’t have the right platform to run it on: My MCE machine is – well – running Windows MCE, my laptop is running Ubuntu (no luck with the debian packages and no ubuntu-packages). shion is running Gentoo, but she’s headless, so I have to use a remote X-connection which is awfully slow and non-scriptable.

The solution I want works on the Linux (or MacOS X) console, is scriptable and – well – works.

I guess I’m going the hard-core way and use transcode which is what dvd::rip is using – provided I find good documentation (I’m more than willing to read and learn – if the documentation is current enough and actually documents the software that I’m running and not the software at the state of two years ago).

I’ll keep you posted on how I’m progressing.