spiralofhope

DVD ripping, Linux audio ripping and encoding >

I have a DVD of a musical performance and there are a couple songs on it that I love so much, that I want to add them to my digital music collection.

Here are instructions for extracting the audio tracks from a DVD to “wav” files which can then be transcoded to any format you like.

(Thanks to the The Ithaca Free Software Association (IFSA) – archive)

You’ll need the mplayer package to do the audio extraction in addition to the various software bits and pieces which allow you to play DVD’s in the first place.

Getting a list of the DVD’s contents

The following mplayer command is useful for listing information about what the DVD contains (the -frames 0 option just tells mplayer not to begin playing the DVD):

mplayer -identify -frames 0 dvd://

Note, you could also install the lsdvd package and use that.

Extracting Tracks to .wav format

Here’s an example of extracting the second “chapter” from the first “title” on the DVD to a .wav file.

mplayer -vc dummy -vo null -af resample=44100:0:0 -ao pcm:file=filename.wav -chapter 2-2 dvd://1

Let’s go through the command line arguments:

• -vc dummy (use a dummy video codec, because we don’t want the video output)
• -vo null (see above)
• -af resample=44100:0:0 (set the sample rate (very high))
• -ao pcm:file=filename.wav (set the output format and specify the filename)
• -chapter 2-2 (tells mplayer which chapters to begin and end on)

• dvd://1 (specifies title “1” on the dvd)