On Thu, 2007-10-18 at 20:04 -0700, Kurt Granroth wrote:

> That's all for the general case.  In your specific case, I wouldn't
> recommend using mplayer and ffmpeg at all.  Instead, use mencoder.
> mencoder ships with mplayer, usually, and it is designed to transcode
> video streams on the fly.  Here is nearly *exactly* what you want to do:
> 
> http://gentoo-wiki.com/HOWTO_Rip_DVD_mencoder
> 
> And if you want a script that does it all for you:
> 
> http://diveintomark.org/archives/2007/06/07/howto-batch-encode-video-for-ipod-under-linux-2007-edition
----
OK - some feedback on the above link...

overkill

I did manage to get the above script to work but it took a bit of doing
on Fedora. The script had 4 requisite package installs, 3 of which are
readily available in Fedora/Livna/RPMForge packages, the other was not.
I downloaded the source, installed the requisite development code to
compile and with a few missteps (probably not important to detail),
finally got it to work.

The script, (much like the gentoo-wiki link above) has a 2 pass
methodology (actually 3 passes if you count the last pass to write out
the resultant file) took 3 hours and 12 minutes to run. About 10 minutes
to rip the 5.1 Gigabytes from the DVD to hard disk, approximately 1.25
hours for each of the two mencoder passes and the balance (perhaps 30
minutes) to convert the avi file created by the second mencoder pass
into an mp4 file.

This time suck of 3+ hours was a real 'debugging' problem because I only
found out about the build issues at the end of the process when it
couldn't find the necessary libraries in /usr/local/lib and had to
create symbolic links for those files into /usr/lib to get it to work
(/usr/local/bin is in my path but not /usr/local/lib).

Anyway, the result was a single 451 Mb file (Crosby Stills Nash) and the
picture and sound quality are indeed top notch.

My script broke it into each individual 'chapters' (songs) which much
prefer for music videos and it took (I believe) less than half the time
(only one pass) and I can't tell the difference either in video or audio
quality (I wouldn't expect audio quality to differ anyway since the
difference is in the video downscale functions. Hey, I'm going from DVD
down to like 320x240 - I would expect the result to be great.

My guess is that if my intent was to play the iPod video on a television
or monitor again (enlarged) the scripted methodology linked above would
probably be a better way to go.

Thanks

Craig

If someone intends to build the 'gpac' package on Fedora (necessary for
the above link) and needs some help, I did get it done. I also learned
about the difficulty for root to do a make install when building as user
on an NFS mounted home directory (must copy to /tmp first  ;-)

Time to Pink Floyd ! ! ! (Pulse)

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