… and a very old laptop.

Today’s mission: I got this DVD with the video recording of my most recent adventure in Japan. I want to take the video itself away from the menu fluff, and put it here for everyone to see.

Step one: Getting the DVD to work on my laptop

First fail: I insert the DVD in my ubuntu laptop, and it begins to auto-play, loading the movie player. Apparently, the ubuntu packager’s mothers never told them not to auto-play any strange media that connects to their computers :-(.

At least, no problems recognizing the DVD.

Step two: Installing the DVD ripping software

Drebes suggested Handbrake. `Apt-cache search dvd rip` suggests acidrip. Let’s try acidrip first.

Step three, part a: trying to rip the video out using acidrip

Downloaded Acidrip, and ran it. The man file does not explain a lot about the command line parameters. Theoretically, the defaults are sane. I can press the “RIP” button and generate and
avi file, but I can’t get mplayer or xine to successfully read it. Not really into reading manuals and manuals describing codecs, so let’s try handbrake.

Funnily enough, the “preview” button from acidrip shows me a nice video, with nice sound – is it reading straight from the DVD?

Step three, part b: trying out handbrake

download the binary. Run the binary: Handbrake -c 1 -i /dev/hdc -o file.mp4

There it goes. A nice, small video. Now I just need to find a place to put this binary in.