Tag: linux

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 Whatever you do, you either get outdated software (fink) or not really working freeware tools documented in outdated tutorials.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a good thing, but unfortunately, it fails at things like awful documentation, hard-coded paths to files everywhere and outdated tools.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.

Intel Mac Mini, Linux, Ethernet

If you have one of these new Intel Macs, you will sooner or later find yourself in the situation of having to run Linux on one of them. (Ok. Granted: The situation may be coming sooner for some than for others).

Last weekend, I was in that situation: I had to install Linux on an Intel Mac Mini.

The whole thing is quite easy to do and if you don’t need Mac OS X, you can just go ahead and install Linux like you would on any other x86 machine (provided the hardware is sufficiently new to have the BIOS emulation layer already installed – otherwise you have to install the Firmware Update first – you’ll notice by the mac not booting from the CD despite holding c during the initial boot sequence).

You can partition the disk to your liking – the Mac bootloader will notice that there’s something fishy with the parition layout (the question-mark-on-a-folder icon will blink one or two times) before passing control to the BIOS emulation which will be able to boot Linux from the partitions you created during installation.

Don’t use grub as bootloader though.

I don’t know if it’s something grub does to the BIOS or if it’s something about the partition table, but grub can’t launch stage 1.5 and thus is unable to boot your installation.

lilo works fine though (use plain lilo when using the BIOS emulation for the boot process, not elilo)

When you are done with the installation process, something bad will happen sooner or later though: Ethernet will stop working.

This is what syslog has to say about it:

NETDEV WATCHDOG: eth0: transmit timed out
sky2 eth0: tx timeout
sky2 eth0: transmit ring 60 .. 37 report=60 done=60
sky2 hardware hung? flushing

When I pulled the cable and plugged it in again, the kernel even oops’ed.

The macs have a Marvel Yukon ethernet chipset. This is what lspci has to tell us: 01:00.0 Ethernet controller: Marvell Technology Group Ltd. 88E8053 PCI-E Gigabit Ethernet Controller (rev 22). The driver to use in the kernel config is “SysKonnect Yukon2 support (EXPERIMENTAL)” (CONFIG_SKY2)

I guess the EXPERIMENTAL tag is warranted for once.

The good news is, that this problem is fixable. The bad news is: It’s tricky to do.

Basically, you have to update the driver with the version that is in the repository of what’s going to be kernel 2.6.19

Getting a current version of sky.c and sky.h is not that difficult. Unfortunately though, the new driver won’t compile with the current 2.6.18 kernel (and upgrading to a pre-rc is out of the question – even more so considering the ton of stuff going into 2.6.19).

So first, we have to patch in this changeset to make the current release of sky compile.

Put the patch to /usr/src/linux and patch with patch -p1

Then fetch the current revision of sky2.c and sky2.h and overwrite the existing files. I used the web interface to git for that as I have no idea how the command line tools work.

Recompile the thing and reboot.

For me, this fixed the problem with the sky2 driver: The machine in question is now running for a whole week without any networking lockups – despite heavy network load at times.

While happy to see this fixed, my statement about not buying too new hardware (posting number 6 here on gnegg.ch – ages ago) if you intend to use Linux on it seems to continue to apply.