On Sun, 23 Oct 2005 11:15:04 -0700, bruce wrote: > hi... > > i have a possible project that's going to require that i get into the world > of dvd. i'd need to be able to play around with/create/play dvd media > files... > > initial research on google seems to give a number of open source apps for > playing dvds (xine/mplayer). are there associated open source tools for > editing the underlying dvd files... > > so, my questions: > what's the easiest tool to use to get started looking/playing around with > dvd files on FC3? > are there "open source" test dvd files that I can use to test/play with? > ideally, I want to be able to take a test dvd file, add some information to > it, play the file, see the results of the 'information add' operation > > any thoughts/etc... would be helpful and appreciated. > > thanks > > bruce > bedouglas@xxxxxxxxxxxxx Both xine and mplayer are players, they do not modify the files, so in particular you can't add information, etc. For viewing they are both good viewers, and the defaults are fine, and so is vlc (video-lan client). I liked oggle too, but for some reason it disappeared from FC4. To change the files, you need e.g. mencoder, or transcode. All of these programs can handle many video formats, so they use many codecs, each with many many options of its own. Consequently, for all but the simplest encoding tasks, there are a zillion options to tune the encoding, far too many to be discussed here. If you're serious about it, you must subscribe to the mplayer and/or transcode mailing lists. Often, for the most obscure options, help can only come from the developers themselves. For mencoder there is a very decent gui called acidrip, which allows you to select the most useful/common options. For transcode there is dvd::rip, but I checked it out about a month ago and seemed it didn't keep up with transcode. For simple dvd ripping there are other tools specialized in that, like vobcopy, dvdbackup, streamdvd, probably more. Vlc does ripping too.
