[oclug] dvds

[Mike Carignan]

On Fri, 30 Aug 2002, Michael P. Soulier wrote:

>     If I, within my own rights of fair use, with to copy a DVD that I bought
> and paid for, for my own use, what would people recommend? I would need to rip
> it to an mpeg I suppose, and slice it up so that the pieces would be burnable
> to standard iso9660 media (no DVD burner yet). 

Well, since it's for fair use only... ;)

If you don't mind the lossy DivX format, there's the drip project
http://drip.sourceforge.net/ - you then burn the resulting avi file to a
standard CD or two.  The 2 major downsides to this are:
1. You generally can't play it in a regular DVD player - there are a few
out there (mostly in Malaysia though I think) that will play DivX, but not
really any in North America
2. While you often get good results, it will be noticably worse quality
than the DVD

The other option is to create VCDs or (even better) SVCDs, however I don't
know of any good linux utilities to accomplish this.  SVCDs use the same
video codec as DVDs (mpeg2), but do not maintain the AC3 sound (it gets
downgraded to stereo like all the other formats I've mentioned).  VCDs use
the mpeg format. VCDs will almost defenitely play in any standalone DVD
players, SVCDs will play in most new ones. (VCD = Video CD, SVCD = Super
Video CD - both are formats for video on standard CDs)

Please note that mpeg and mpeg2 are also lossy formats (most video formats
are). Also, I believe there are some legal issues to using certain
versions of DivX, because they were based on the reverse-engineered
Microsoft mpeg4 codec (IIRC).

For size and quality, DivX is usually best.  If file size/amount of CDs is
not an issue, SVCD is the best (you'd need to find some good linux tools
to make it however) for quality and ease of use (in DVD players).  VCDs
fall somehwere in between in my opinion, but the advantage to VCDs is
their widespread adoption.  You won't have any problems playing a VCD on
most equipment.

Mike Carignan
--
mcari051 at uottawa.ca
http://www.planethalflife.com/tuxportal/