Archiving DVDs and CDs

Since now I have a Android TV I put away my HTPC and with that the capability to view DVDs or listen CDs directly.

So I converted my entire CD and DVD library to media files and stored in my home NAS.

Since we are talking hundreds of DVDs and CDs, I was using some tools.

CD ripping

For CD ripping, pretty much everything can be done with abcde. I would use the following command:

abcde -G -k -o mp3 -x

Options:

• -G : Get album art.
• -k : Keep wav after encoding. This is not really necessary.
• -o mp3 : Output to mp3.
• -x : Eject the CD after all tracks have been read.

Afterwards I would use eyeD3 to embed the cover art and tweak things. (Note under archlinux, eyeD3 is installed from the python2-eyed3 package).

To add cover art:

eyeD3 --add-image="$cover_file":FRONT_COVER \*.mp3

DVD Ripping

For DVD Ripping I was using a couple of homegrown scripts. These can be found on github.

I started using vobcopy, but if I were to do this again I would use dvdbackup with the -M option. vobcopy is quite old and probably is orphaned by now.

Scripts for archiving media

Scripts:

• archive-dvd : Create an iso image from a DVD.
• alltitles : Extract titles/chapters from a DVD.
• auto.sh : Used to transcode titles/chapters extracted by alltitles

archive-dvd

This script uses vobcopy and mkisofs to create an ISO file. Just run the script and insert a DVD, you will get an ISO file in return.

alltitles

Usage:

[option_vars] sh alltitles [chapter]

Option vars:

• drive=[device-path] defaults to /dev/sr0
• titles="01 02 03 ..." defaults to all titles in DVD (as listed by lsdvd) You can also specify titles as: title="01,1-4 01,5-8" This will create two files, one with track 1, chaptes one trough four (inclusive) and another one with track 1, chapters five through eigth (inclusive)

Command options:

chapter: Leave blank for all chapters, otherwise:

-chapter [$start-$end]

Will dump starting from $start until $end. (or end) If you only want to extract chapter 7 by itself, use -chapter 7-7

auto.sh

Usage:

sh $0 [options]

vob files must be the ones extracted from alltitles.

Options:

• --preview|-p : Only encode 30 seconds from 4 minutes in
• --copy|-c : Do only copy
• --interlace|-i : Force interlace filter
• --no-interlace|+i : Disables interlace filter

Dependancies

• libdvdcss (or equivalent). This is used by the dvdread library to decode CSS protected DVDs.
• libdvdread This is used to read DVD by a number of binaries.
• vobcopy Used by archive-dvd to extract the data that will be used to create the ISO image. Uses libdvdread.
• udisks or udisks2 Used by the scripts to detect when a CD/DVD is inserted.
• cdrkit Used to create the iso images by archive-dvd.
• lsdvd Used by alltitles.sh to get track information.
• mplayer Used by alltitles.sh to extract DVD titles/chapters.
• ffmpeg Used by alltitles.sh to encode video.

Some useful commands

Using mplayer to play extract:

mplayer -dvd-device /dev/sr0 dvd://$title -chapter $chapter-$chapter -dumpstream -dumpfile ~/$title.VOB