converting avi's to vcd with tovid

Tried to make vcds first with mencoder. The documentation made it look easy enough. I used vcdimager to process the mpgs produced by mencoder to make bin and cue files. I burned it on CD, and unfortunately, my DVD player could not recognize it or play it at all!

That convinced me that VCD making was not as easy as the mplayer documentation made it to be. I needed a frontend. I tried out tovid. Then burned the VCD. The VCD played all right for the first several minutes, but then the video just stops dead, and all i get is audio!

Urgh, tovid still isn't perfect, but i'll keep an eye on its development.

I think i go back to trying linux video maker. Although still alpha, i remember trying it and it produced workable VCDs.

compiling faad2

apart from following the instructions on README.linux, delete the lines under rpm: in Makefile.am, and Makefile.in.

make should then work properly.

animated gifs!

i recently discovered, after visiting a fan site for Equilibrium, that there is something called an animated gif. Coolness! A picture file that animates! Putting one of those on a website would make the site so much cooler.

I found out that mplayer can output animated gifs from video files using -vo option. I need to investigate further to find out how to control resolution of output and how to restrict the time mplayer plays. This will be rather more complicated.

SAMBA!!

I got samba working in one try!

the slackware book is so simple and useful. I followed the instructions and it worked. I don't need to rely on Suse GUI to set up SAMBA any more.

just set the workgroup, encrypt password yes, or else Windows Xp won't be able to access it. security is user.

then, set a path to share.

then add samba users. this is the part i didn't understand before.

to add samba users, the username must already exist on the samba server.

for example, i use fawkes as a username on my samba server.
then as root, smbpasswd -a fawkes
it'll ask for a samba password for the samba user fawkes.

when in windows, navigate to the samba server, and key in the username fawkes and password, and you'll be granted access!

what's more, you can restrict access to different paths by specifying the parameter "valid users"

xorg and support for i810

i have got everything working like a peach under slackware 10.2. my only gripe is that the Xorg shipped with it (Xorg 6.8.2) has crappy support for my i810 graphics card. VIdeo playback is poor and hardware scaling on it does not work (i.e. when mplayer or xine plays a video file, it cannot expand it to full screen size). Apparantly its because support for i810 has deteriorated since Xorg 6.8.

I am gonna try installing slackware 10.0, since that still uses Xorg 6.7.0. I remember i had no video issues using it before, so i hope it works. Full video support is important for me because one of the attractions of linux was mplayer (cvs). Not being able to use mplayer properly is a huge setback.

I'm gonna burn slack 10.0 to CD-R since it will be useful to keep this one.

dvd::rip versus acidrip

dvd;:rip is definitely easier and more newbie friendly. It also handholds you through the process of ripping to VCD or SVCD, while acidrip can do so, but does not holod hold your hand. You have to type in the mencoder command line options yourself to encode to VCD or SVCD.

Other differences? dvd::rip uses transcode, acidrip uses mencoder.
Also, a big difference: acidrip supports queueing so if you have many titles on a DVD, you can queue several jobs. dvd::rip does not suport this and so you cannot leave it running overnight to rip several titles like with acidrip.

Based on just this difference, I would say acidrip is the better of the two. In fact, i haven't seen any other dvd ripping frontend that supports queueing. DVD Rip-O-Matic and gbDVDenc don't either.

for deinterlacing on acidrip,check post filters and key in "pp=lb"

If acidrip keeps halting saying mencoder stopped interrupted by user, check that the bitrate is set to a proper level. If it is set to less than 4, it will not work.

compiling konverter

first, cd src, then type make (i can't find any configure file or bootstrap)

if it complains about klineedit.h, then you need to edit the Makefile

add to INCPATH
-I/opt/kde/include

or whichever path klineedit.h is found


O, even then the compile fails for some reason. It talks about failing to find -lkio, lkdeui, and etc.

Just ignore them. Go to src/bin, and execute konverter, to see if it works. If it complains about not finding libkaffeine.so, then its working.
You just need to install kaffeine. ./configure --enable-static to get libkaffeinepart.so

then it should work.

acidrip and linux video maker

Firstly, I discovered linux video maker, and excellent and easy to use gui that allows you to encode any video to VCD, SVCD or DVD format.

Acidrip. After finally getting DVD::rip to work perfectly, I was interested in trying out its rival, Acidrip. I found out how to get it to compile.

Google for Gtk2-perl. Download and install Extutils-Depends; Extutils-Pkgconfig; Glib; and Gtk2.

Then install lsdvd and acidrip.

dvd::rip tip

sorry, another tip I forgot to mention.

vi /etc/fstab, go to the line for your dvdrom drive. make sure that instead of "owners", you have "users" inserted.

this will enable dvdrip to run more smoothly without problems when ripping.

xvid4conf - dvd::rip optional component

ftp://ftp.nerim.net/debian-marillat/pool/main/x/xvid4conf/

this is the proper link to the latest source.

comprehensive guide to compiling dvd::rip from slack 10.2

Always, where possible, get the sources from cvs or svn. I didn't install ogmtools because i plan to encode all dvds to either xvid or (S)VCD

1. libdvdread
2. libdvdcss
3. DO NOT NEED TO COMPILE Imagemagick because Slackware already has it. Indeed, some people find that the more recent versions of Imagemagick cause problems with dvdrip.
4. lame
5. mpeg2dec (run ./bootstrap to generate the configure file) [i think this comes with mjpegtools. Do NOT install the mpeg2dec-mjpegtools package. Transcode compile fails with this.]
6. mjpegtools
7. xvidcore
8. ffmpeg (./configure --enable-shared --enable-mp3lame --enable-xvid --enable-gpl)
9. transcode (first, locate mjpegtools.pc. If not found in /usr/lib/pkgconfig, cp it to that location) [./configure --enable-imagemagick --enable-mjpegtools --enable-sdl --enable-gtk]
10. libcdio (vcdimager dependancy) ; cp libcdio.pc, libiso9660.pc and libcdio_paranoia.pc to /usr/lib/pkgconfig so vcdimager can find it.
11. vcdimager
12. then follow the other instructions on the dvd::rip website for installing the rest of the dvd::rip GUI. The hardest part is already over!

dvd::rip subtitles

In order to rip subtitles, dvd::rip needs subtitle ripper, which up until now, i could never get to compile. It kept saying that ld cannot find -lppm. Didn't know what on earth that meant. Google for -lppm didn't yield much useful.

Then i looked in the directory and saw a executable subtitle2vobsub and executed it. It said there was a missing library libppm.so.9. Now that was useful information. Google for that, and i found that a package called netpbm provides, among other things, libppm.so.9.

I am compiling it now.

________________________________________-

Still fails to compile. Googled for subtitleripper slackware and got this interesting post
http://article.gmane.org/gmane.comp.video.dvdrip.user/4671

Appears that if you edit the Makefile and substitute "-lppm" with "-lnetpbm" it compiles. Tried it and it works!

backing up DVDs with DVD::rip

Note: I only use this program to backup DVDs I already own, and do not condone or encourage its use in any other way and take no responsibility for persons who use this tool to make illegal copies of DVDs.


I use ffmpeg in transcode to encode video to mpeg4 compatible video. ffmpeg must be compiled with shared libraries enabled (./configure --enable-shared). then, lame (for mp3 support) and xvidcore must be compiled before transcode is compiled. Then compile DVD::rip according to the instructions on its homepage.

A DVD contains vobs and ifo and bup files. It may first seem confusing to work out which vob represents which title. Well, you don't need to puzzle over that. Use dvd::rip and it works it out for you. It will rip each title to a different folder for you.

However, dvd::rip only reads the titles as different numbers: title one, two, three, etc. If you are dealing with a complex DVD made up of many episodes and extras and need to know what each title contains, then proceed with the following.

You cannot work out the contents by looking at the ifo files, as they are in binary (I think). What you should do is play the DVD on a good DVD player on your computer, one that tells you which title you are on while you play it.

Play the DVD, click on the different titles on the menu, and then note which numerical title the player says you are on when you are playing a particular title. Then you will be able to match the title number with name.

In some cases, DVDs may be arranged very oddly. For example, I had a DVD which had four episodes on it, plus four extras, which should mean that it has 8 titles, plus some odd titles for the menus and adverts. However, dvdrip saw 21 titles on it! I played it with my DVD player and checked it out, clicking on all the available titles from the DVD title menu. Turns out, they only took up 11 titles. The remaining 10 titles on the DVD were simply repeats of the others, or more likely, are soft links or shortcuts to the other existing titles. If i hadn't checked, i would have ripped the same title twice.
I have no idea why the DVD provider authored the DVD in such a way.