TIP DVD Ripping for the Hauppauge 350

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[edit] DVD Ripping for Hauppauge 350

The mythdvd plugin generates ".avi" files. This can be played on a Hauppauge 350, but the audio will go through your computer sound card rather than through the TV. In addition, I found the full DVD resolution of 720 x 480 to be a bit sluggish - skips forward has a noticable delay.

You can avoid these problems by ripping the DVD yourself. This is fairly easy, but if you aren't familar with the transcode command line options it can be pretty difficult to figure out what options to use.

Here's how to do this:

  • If you don't already have them, emerge transcode, mjpegtools, and lsdvd. You should have the USE flags dvdread and mjpeg set.
  • Determine the title you want to rip. One way to do this is to use the command "lsdvd", this prints out the title numbers and times. You can usually pick out which title is the movie - for a single movie it will be the longest title and for a dvd of multiple shows it will be the set of titles that have approximately the right length (e.g., about 20 minutes for a half hour TV show).
  • Rip the title. This set of commands will read the data from your DVD, resize the video stream to 640x480, and convert the audio stream to MP2 (title should be replaced with your title number from lsdvd, e.g., "11". tmp is whatever temporary directory/file you want to use, name is whatever you want the file called - typically the name of the movie): 
 tccat -T #{title},-1,1 -i /dev/dvd > #{tmp}.vob
 transcode -H 10 -x vob -i #{tmp}.vob -w 6000 -F 8 --export_asr 2 -b 128  --a52_drc_off -M 2 -B 0,10,8 -y mpeg2enc,mp2enc -o #{tmp}
 mplex -f 8 -r 9800 -V -o "#{name}.mpg" #{tmp}.m2v #{tmp}.mpa"
  • A modification of this is needed for ripping movies (as opposed to DVDs of TV shows). DVDs can be recorded with one of two frame rates - 23.976 (typical of movies) or 29.970 (typical of TV shows). Although the Hauppauge 350 will play a mpeg at 23.976 fps, this looks fairly jumpy on my system. I get better results with a mpeg at 29.970 fps. You can add the following options to the transcode command listed above: 
 -J modfps=buffer=4:clonetype=4 -f 0,1 --export_fps 0,4

This tells transcode to use the modfps filter, going from an input frame rate of 23.976 (or f=1) to 29.970 (or f=4). If you are unsure if you DVD input is a 23.976 or 29.970, you can use the command 

 tcprobe -i #{tmp}.vob

after you have read the data from the DVD using tccat. This will print the frame rate, among other information.

  • Move your resulting file into wherever mythtv is looking for its video files, e.g., "/mnt/store/dvd". Note that if you have multiple titles for one DVD (e.g, multiple episodes of a TV show) you can create subdirectories.
  • Mythtv won't immediately recognize that there are new videos available, since you didn't go through the mythtv ripping process. To get mythtv to scan the directories and add your new videos, select "Utilities / Setup -> Video Manager". Mythtv will scan for new videos, and if you like you can edit the information it finds.
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