Help! DVD encoding

[samwichse]

Hello all, I'm in need of a bit of help. I've been doing a backup of all my DVDs to CD (mpeg4). So when a friend, who was impressed by the idea asked me to back her favorite DVDs up (tv episodes), I said: "sure, no problemo, it's a piece of cake."

Wrongo.

I don't know what they've done to these dang disks, but they will not synch up right in mplayer (and hence in mencoder), just trying to play the dvds (same thing happens when encoding). Funny thing is, xine, which uses the same dang libdvdread as mplayer does for playback synchs up perfectly!

This is what I'm using right now to encode:

mencoder dvd://1 -dvd-device /dev/cdrom -chapter 1 -vop pp=16,scale=320:240 -oac mp3lame -ovc lavc -lavcopts vcodec=mpeg4:vhq:vratetol=350000 -o movie.avi

Any ideas?

To recap:
mplayer = no out of sync in playback and recording
xine = perfect playback
xine don't do recording

Sam

[SpookyEddy]

I use dvd::rip (GUI frontend for transcode), could be worth a shot.

Regards

ed

I am away from my Linux box right now, but does not mplayer support multiple synch methods that can be forced manually? Autodetection sync routines do not always work correctly for all movies.

I definitely know Xine has several sync modes, but that doesn't do you much good with mencoder. :/

I am with Ed, parse the movie through transcode and see what happens.

Robert Richmond

[samwichse]

Hey, sorry I just disappeared on this one, but I couldn't ever get dvd::rip to compile right, and the friend just said it wasn't worth it. However, I just got a wild hair when I realized that 2 pass encoding is supposed to be way better quality than 1 pass. Can this be done with mencoder?

Sam

[SpookyEddy]

linkage

2-pass encoding: the name comes from the fact that this method encodes the file twice. The first encoding (dubbed pass) creates some temporary files (*.log) with a size of few megabytes, do not delete them yet (you can delete the AVI). In the second pass, the 2-pass output file is created, using the bitrate data from the temporary files. The resulting file will have much better image quality. If this is the first time you heard about this, you should consult some guides available on the Net.

This example shows how to encode a DVD to a 2-pass MPEG-4 ("DIVX") AVI. Just two commands are needed:
rm frameno.avi - remove this file, which can come from a previous 3-pass encoding (it interferes with current one)
mencoder -dvd 2 -ovc lavc -lavcopts vcodec=mpeg4:vpass=1 -oac copy -o movie.avi
mencoder -dvd 2 -ovc lavc -lavcopts vcodec=mpeg4:vpass=2 -oac copy -o movie.avi

Regards

ed

[samwichse]

Hey, thanks for the quick reply, perhaps I'm just googl-ly challenged?

Sam