Ramblings

I had a friend ask about DVD ripping tools for Windows XP yesterday, which got me looking around again. It’s been a while since I needed DVD ripping tools for Win. In Linux, I’ve been using this cool little GUI front end for mencoder called QuickRip.

Back in my freshman year here at LU (Fall 2000) we really got into DVD ripping. Back in those dark ages I was still running Windows and so all the ripping stuff I had was for Windows. When I switched to Linux one of the things I missed was my ripping software. There just wasn’t much out there for Linux that was any good or easy to use. I still have all that Windows software, but needless to say, it’s all getting fairly old. New versions are out, new functionality is out, new codecs are available, and the tools don’t neccessarily still all work like I remember.

Well, I started looking around for a nice integrated package that was free for Windows yesterday for my friend and discovered that somewhere around 95% of all the links I could find for DVD ripping were Linux related. They were all talking about dvd::rip or MEncoder. I’m a big MPlayer (MEncoder is a piece of MPlayer) fan and MEncoder is what QuickRip uses for encoding. A year or two ago I ran into dvd::rip and had a world of trouble getting all the required components installed, so I gave up. It looked like a sweet little program, but it was just too much work.

One really nice feature of dvd::rip is it’s cluster mode. In cluster mode, you can break up the encoding process and pass out the pieces to several different computers running the program. I really liked the idea when I first encountered it, but since I never got it up and running, I never had the oportunity to play with it much. At the time, the dvd::rip project had a link to some other guy’s website where he had put together a bootable CD that had everything installed. It looked like exactly what I wanted (boot a normally Windows machine off the CD and use it over night). The CD was labeled Alpha quality at the time (but so much OSS is labeled that way).

I ran across the project again yesterday and it sparked my interest again (and this time I have much more experience and a better software installation method [Gentoo's Portage]). However, I couldn’t find the link to the bootable CD project anymore. A quick Google and I found the page again, but to my dismay it hasn’t been updated in the last two years. Oh well, it’s not going to stop me from trying to play with dvd::rip and it’s cluster mode this summer :)

Anyone know of an easy way to create a bootable Linux CD with dvd::rip and assocciated utilities installed?