GNU/Linux Desktop Survival Guide by Graham Williams
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DVD Sound Track

You can extract sound from a DVD, one track at a time or a chapter at a time. Some simple command line examples should suffice to demonstrate how this is done.

A DVD in your DVD drive will probably be identified as /dev/dvd. Have a look at its table of contents with the lsdvd command:

  $ lsdvd
  libdvdread: Using libdvdcss version 1.2.5 for DVD access
  Title: 01, Length: 02:32:44 Chapters: 26, Cells: 27, Audio streams: 02, Subpictures: 01
  Title: 02, Length: 00:17:36 Chapters: 02, Cells: 02, Audio streams: 01, Subpictures: 00
  Title: 03, Length: 00:00:11 Chapters: 02, Cells: 02, Audio streams: 01, Subpictures: 00
  Longest track: 1

This DVD has three titles, the first one (Title 01) probably contains the main material, as it is identified as being the longest track. It also has two audio streams.

To capture the audio from the tenth chapter of the first title, saving it in ogg format, the command line is simply (okay, so not so simple):

  $transcode -i /dev/dvd -x dvd -T 1,10,1 -a 0 -y ogg -m track10.ogg

The arguments identify the input as /dev/dvd (-i), the type of input as DVD (-x), the title, chapter, and angle to encode, in this case being title 1, chapter 10, and camera angle 1 (-T), the audio track is track 0 (-a), the output format is ogg (-y, and the output filename is track10.ogg (-m).

To extract multiple chapters from a title you can do the following composite command:

  $ for i in '1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9'; do 
  >   echo transcode -i /dev/dvd -x dvd -T 1,$i,1 -a 0 -y ogg -m track0$i.ogg; 
  > done

Another example generates mp3 output of chapter 20 from title 1:

  $ transcode -i /dev/dvd -x dvd -T 1,20,1 -a 0 -y raw -m track20.mp3

To extract the whole audio track of a title (all chapters) as ogg audio:

  $ transcode -i /dev/dvd -x dvd -T 1,-1 -a 0 -y ogg -m audiotrack.ogg

If you prefer WAV files, the following will do it:

  $ transcode -i /dev/dvd -x dvd -T 1,20 -a 0 -y wav -m track20.wav