Backing up a Personal DVD in Linux with Command-line Tools

First, he makes an image copy of the disk. Why not just use the disk itself? Then, he reads the image, which contains mpeg videos, and apparantly re-encodes that to dvd compliant mpeg (which it should have been to start with) and then authors it in a horribly minimalist way. (If you start watching a long dvd without chapters, you better watch it through, because it could be hard to seek on a replay.)

lxdvdrip would have solved his problem from start to finish.

vobcopy or streamdvd would have been better ways to aquire a dvd compatible mpeg video from the disk. vamps is one way to re-quantize such a video (degrade it to a smaller size without re-encoding)

And I dont consider dvdauthor to be a frontline tool. Its a tool's tool. For most people, especially for a one-off like this, there are several front-ends. If its a command line one you want, dvdwizard is excellent.

Copying to an image on the hard drive has the advantage of no spin-up time. A paused video can lead to an idle DVD drive, and if the player doesn't know to wait for spin-up after resuming playback, it can time-out and terminate on a "unexpected" error.

@set:

This is a "get's the job done" solution. Obviously, there is more one way to skin a cat... and this was just a quick and easy way to do what needed to be done.

gus3 is right in his reasoning for copying to in iso file first from the disc. I always rather give myself a local file to work off of before digging in. That way if you wish to experiment, you don't always have to spin up the disc or worry about problems on that end. Plus, I then have the image as a backup if I should lose my disc or my newly encoded format.

As for the encoding, in this situation the original disc was on a dual layer format and was about 7.4GB. After the quick and simple encoding with mencoder I was down to 4.7GB, thus almost halving the file without much effort. If I was doing a 1:1 backup, you would absolutely be correct in saying it was unnecessary, and in writing up the quick summary, I guess I neglected to fully clarify that point. Thanks.

I think the main idea here is it's a nice way to quickly make a copy of your disc, (+/- the encoding --- see above explanation), with tools that should be readily available on your average desktop system without hunting things down. Looking across most of the dozen or so machines around the house, from very old to modern, they all had these 4 command-line tools ready to roll.

Thanks for pointing out dvdwizard... I'll have to give it a look-see.

.... Oh and as for chapters... yes I did purposefully leave that out as noted.

But you can easily include in your xml file with something like:

<vob file="this_project.mpg" chapters="0,0:10,0:20,0:30,0:40,0:50" />

If you want a command line solution for backing up a dvd, you should take a look at dvdbackup.