September 10th, 2008
The great thing about standards is there are so many to choose from.
- Someone
undvd 0.5.0 introduced a new option to choose the codec and container for the rip. The only problem is that you have to know which ones to choose. mencoder supports a staggering number of codecs and containers, most of which are now exposed also in undvd. The resulting rip can also be remuxed to a couple of other popular containers with additional tools.
But I wasn't content with solving a problem by introducing a new problem. Now, it's not so easy to say exactly which combinations are good and bad, but if at least you knew which ones definitely do not work, that would be a start, wouldn't it? Then at least you can rescue the user from phase one of the Monte Carlo method in getting something that actually works.
The methodology is like this:
- Rip 5 seconds of the dvd using undvd with a given container/video codec/audio codec combination.
- Attempt playback with mplayer.
This is what codectest does. The result is either a text file showing line by line whether or not the given combination successfully produced a rip, or a pretty matrix picture. This gives you an idea of what you can expect to use. If you run this on your system, it's also a tip off if you see something that should work but doesn't.
I must stress that if the given combination of codecs does produce a file, this is no guarantee that the file is to be considered a good rip. It may not play on other media players, it may not even play on mplayer (incidentally, this is something akin to a fuzzer, I've discovered that some combinations really aren't expected :D ). So if codectest says it works, verify that you get a working video file out of it!
The standard set looks something like this:
It's also possible to run it on the full combination of all codecs and containers that are now exposed in undvd. You'll need a few hours to do it:
