techThursday, June 08, 2006
ubuntu, mplayer/mencoder, and ripperX
ubuntu is pretty cool. It's by far the best desktop linux distro for the average guy. You gotta jump some hoops to get it to do things like rip cds and dvds, but you can get it. I had to fix some of my dvd ripping scripts, but it's all working now.
mplayer is by far the best video player available for any platform. I use it's twin mencoder for all my ripping - the resulting videos won't play well in anything but mplayer - I suppose that I could learn how to make it create media player friendly files, but I have no motivation to do so. I save some time on the encoding by just copying the audio stream directly from the dvd instead of re-encoding it. I could save a few megabytes if I did re-encode it, but not enough to make it worth the effort. And this is one of the main reasons that they don't play well with media player - it doesn't like to find dvd audio streams in avi files for some reason and won't play them correctly - even though it can handle the exact same streams when found on a dvd. Another thing is aspect ratio - mencoder can encode the aspect into the file, but only mplayer can read it properly. Also, if the ratio is wrong then it's possible to correct it without modifying the video file at all - just create a file specific config file for the video - if it's in the same directory as the video file then it will be parsed by mplayer and you can set the correct aspect ratio and all kinds of other stuff - volume amplification, etc.
ripperX is a cheap little cd ripper that I found for linux - it's actually just a front end for a number of other programs that handle the actual ripping and encoding and junk. It's not fancy or pretty, but it's my new favorite ripper - it has all the features that I like in a ripper and none of the annoyances of other rippers - configuration is simple and straight forward, it handles cddb lookups, the interface is simple, and it gives you a nice little pop-up window when ripping is finished (this might be considered an annoying "feature", but I'm sure it's possible to turn it off - like if I'm watching a movie or something while ripping and don't want this junk popping up). I was bummed when cdex wasn't available for linux, but ripperX is at least as good.
mplayer is by far the best video player available for any platform. I use it's twin mencoder for all my ripping - the resulting videos won't play well in anything but mplayer - I suppose that I could learn how to make it create media player friendly files, but I have no motivation to do so. I save some time on the encoding by just copying the audio stream directly from the dvd instead of re-encoding it. I could save a few megabytes if I did re-encode it, but not enough to make it worth the effort. And this is one of the main reasons that they don't play well with media player - it doesn't like to find dvd audio streams in avi files for some reason and won't play them correctly - even though it can handle the exact same streams when found on a dvd. Another thing is aspect ratio - mencoder can encode the aspect into the file, but only mplayer can read it properly. Also, if the ratio is wrong then it's possible to correct it without modifying the video file at all - just create a file specific config file for the video - if it's in the same directory as the video file then it will be parsed by mplayer and you can set the correct aspect ratio and all kinds of other stuff - volume amplification, etc.
ripperX is a cheap little cd ripper that I found for linux - it's actually just a front end for a number of other programs that handle the actual ripping and encoding and junk. It's not fancy or pretty, but it's my new favorite ripper - it has all the features that I like in a ripper and none of the annoyances of other rippers - configuration is simple and straight forward, it handles cddb lookups, the interface is simple, and it gives you a nice little pop-up window when ripping is finished (this might be considered an annoying "feature", but I'm sure it's possible to turn it off - like if I'm watching a movie or something while ripping and don't want this junk popping up). I was bummed when cdex wasn't available for linux, but ripperX is at least as good.
