Date: Sun, 1 May 2005 21:49:52 -0700 From: Andrew Sparrow <spadger@spadger.best.vwh.net> To: Chuck Robey <chuckr@chuckr.org> Cc: freebsd-multimedia@freebsd.org Subject: Re: ripping cd's Message-ID: <20050501214952.B49531@spadger.best.vwh.net> In-Reply-To: <4275A2C3.1000304@chuckr.org>; from chuckr@chuckr.org on Mon, May 02, 2005 at 03:47:15AM %2B0000 References: <4275A2C3.1000304@chuckr.org>
next in thread | previous in thread | raw e-mail | index | archive | help
On Mon, May 02, 2005 at 03:47:15AM +0000, Chuck Robey wrote: > I am rather amazed that the video work on my amd64 box is going to > remarkably well. The sound works digitally across 5.1 channels, and > what's more, it looks like all of k3b's functions (at least to the point > I understand them) are all working. All completely without any reliance > whatsoever upon x86 compatibility. It's all done with native-built > ports, no packages. > > Anyhow, I have acidrip working well, and I've ripped a dvd. This is > that dvd from a few weeks ago, its' got region==2, and it's in PAL, so I > want to set it up in some format that plays in my friend's old dvd > player, so he can finally, at long last *see* the dvd he paid for. Uh, Y'know, the Cyberhome CH-300 s a tiny little DVD settop. It has has a secret squirrel menu to set it multi-region, does some of the best NTSC/PAL conversion I've seen - ever - on-the-fly, and plays all kinds of non-standard formats[0] without blinking an eye. It has progressive scan, SPDIF output and extra stuff I could care less about - but it Just Works. They run $30-$50 at Rat Shack, depending they're on offer at the moment (they often are). They had a bad rap for reliablity at first - but I've been hammering mine for a year, and nary a glitch.. Mine groks dvdatuthor'd DVDs and VCD/SVCD/XVCD/KVCD etc. generated by vcdimager just fine (and then burnt with cdrecord-ProDVD/growisfs/cdrdao etc). I mention the settop box because transcoding from PAL to NTSC is a CPU pig, - and inevitably the requantization will lose qaulity. But not as much as the transcoding will... And you cannot avoid the transcoding if you're scaling from NTSC to PAL or vice versa. Going from DVD9 to DVD5 will also lose quality. Period. You may not notice it, but you're reducing a ~8.5GB DVD to half that.. Unless you're going to burn this on a $13 dollar DL blank(!), and I don't even know how many DVD players will grok those yet. > He could have watched it some weeks ago on my system, but he wants to > see it at home. How unreasonable! Anyhow, after I ripped it with > Acidrip, it came right up on an .avi format, all in the same format. I sympathise. I have a bunch of Region 2 DVD9 DVD's. I leave them alone and I play them in my $40 settop DVD player. They play great. > So, question, anyone know what sort of format plays from a cd to a dvd > player (I am happily willing to lose the menus) My personal favorite is tovid: http://tovid.sourceforge.net/ It's got a few Linux-ism's - but not that many[1], and it seems to do overall, the most reliable, best quality, most efficient, job of all the myriad of conversion scripts I've seen to date. It'll read a DVD directly and re-quant it, IIRC (I don't ever do that). The dvdrip (dvd::rip) port will turn your DVD into a VCD or an AVI etc. I believe it may also convert the menus and extras etc. for you too. There's also ldvd9to5 in the ports collection, which may or may not do precisely what you want (I believe it should do, but unfortunately, the menu options are all German, which I can't read). And I've never had the patience to run it long enough to see. There's a 'Doze freeware program called DVDShrink, which actually does an awesome job of shrinking a DVD9 to a DVD5. Much better than any *nix-based software, I'm sorry to say. It's default setting is to remove region codes. It apparently runs fine under Wine on Linux, although I haven't tested it myself as my laptop is stuck in 4.x land (where Wine doesn't work anymore and my licensed copy of VMware hates me), and I only just got a desktop. Hope this helps. Feel free to ask questions off-list if you want. There's some very neat tools already in the ports collection. Cheers, Andy [0] for example, NTSC DVD's with MP2 audio - like you tend to get with extracted TyStreams - are not strictly standards-compliant. [1] Mostly things like the location of bash, Linux flags to df, using /proc/cpuinfo etc. A port is almost not worth submitting, athough I guess I could clean up what I have sometime, anyway..
Want to link to this message? Use this URL: <https://mail-archive.FreeBSD.org/cgi/mid.cgi?20050501214952.B49531>