Command Line Tools

GNU/Linux Desktop Survival Guide
by Graham Williams

Command Line Tools

Debian Packages: mjpegtools dvdbackup cpdvd cpvts

A useful command line script to backup a DVD to SVCD is mencvcd:

$ mencvcd battles dvd://3 -w -a 2 -vfr 3

You can obtain information about the contents of title 1 of a DVD with the tcprobe command:

$ tcprobe -i /dev/dvd -T 1

To extract title 1 of your dvd into the file video.avi:

$ mencoder dvd://1 -oac copy -ovc copy -o video.avi

Using acidrip is simpler though (see Section 28.2.1), and the GUI is more informative as to the processing to be performed (e.g., to limit the encoding to a particular size with a particular resolution). Indeed, it is often useful to view the Queue tab of acidrip to see the actual mencoder command that is being run.

You can copy the raw video data from a DVD to your hard disk with either dvdbackup or cpdvd. With cpdvd simply identify the device and a folder which will be created to store the data:

$ cpdvd -d /dev/dvd xyz

You can identify the DVD mount point and a specific title to extract with:

$ cpdvd -m /media/dvd -t 1 xyz

To include subtitles use -s 0 (to get channel 0 subtitles).

Alternatively you can use dvdbackup to extract the data. It will create its own directory for the DVD based on the DVDs title:

$ dvdbackup -F -i/dev/dvd -o.