• DVD to MPEG-2 PS Ripper for Linux

I’ve just released an update to that original script which fixes subtitles in the original MPEG-2 PS mode but now adds the capability to rip MPEG-2 TS. The video stream can still be shrunk and in MPEG-2 PS mode the video is still
requantised but in MPEG-2 TS mode the video is re-encoded as H.264. Requantising is faster but can introduce artifacting. H.264 encoding is slower, but produces very good quality. I am currently re-importing my entire DVD collection, using this script, to my DLNA server using MPEG-2 TS and re-encoding the video to H.264. This gives me high quality rips at relatively small size (~3Gb) whilst preserving Dolby Digital 5.1 audio. Perfect for playback via DLNA on the PS3

Some things to be aware of:

• Subtitles are only supported in MPEG-2 PS mode.
• MPEG-2 PS files created by this script are DVD compliant.
• ISO files created by this script will preserve the chapters from the original DVD.
• The PS3 can only play DTS audio in MPEG-2 PS streams when they have been authored to DVD.
• The PS3 can only play subtitles in MPEG-2 PS streams when they have been authored to DVD.
• The PS3 can’t play DTS audio in MPEG-2 TS streams therefore this script will transcode DTS to AC3 when in MPEG-2 TS mode.

If you are running Ubuntu then I strongly suggest you add the Avenard repository to your system as it includes recent builds of mplayer and x264.

• http://avenard.com/media/Ubuntu_Repository/Ubuntu_Repository.html

To download the script and find out how to make full use of it visit the release page below.

• DVD-to-MPG

• IMDB Film Summary as a MPEG2 video

Today I’ve release v2.0 of that script, which is almost a complete re-write mostly thanks to Eric at yPass.net who contributed significantly. Thanks to Eric the script is much improved since version 1.0, here is a run down of what’s new.

v2.0 2009, 19th September

• Merged yet more contributions from Eric, http://www.ypass.net. Thanks Eric!
• Added usage instructions.
• Added categorisation by Certificate.
• Added dynamic computation of video bitrate.
• Added silent audio generation.
• Added a shell script to reprocess an entire film store.
• Re-added MPEG-2 video encoding.
• Improved video encoding speed by removing pre-processing with ‘jpeg2yuv’.
• Fixed spiffy animations when cover art is not available.
• Fixed spiffy animations on platforms that may have incomplete GD.
• Modified filename input so that an input filename is optional rather than mandatory.

v1.2 2009, 17th July.

• Merged extensive contributions from Eric, http://www.ypass.net. Thanks Eric!
• Updated the README to reflect Eric’s changes.
• MPEG-4 video encoding replaced MPEG-2 video encoding.
• Never released to the public.

To download the script and find out how to make full use of it visit the release page below.

• IMDB-to-MPEG

You’ll have seen reference to “spiffy animations” in the change log, take a look at the example video summary clip below to see for yourself.

• About The Usual_Suspects (~2Mb)
  

As it stands the IMDB-to-MPEG script does what I require, so I will maintain it in it’s current form. However, Eric has been working on a new direction by adding support for NetFlix, creating a GUI with php-gtk and some other cool stuff. While Eric has shared the details with me, I simply don’t have the time to add all that good stuff to IMDB-to-MPEG, so if you like the sound of what Eric has been up to hop over to his site to find out more.

• Netflix Has a Developer API

I’ve been putting this off for ages, I need to “normalise” the volume of my MP3 music music library. Not all CDs sound equally loud. Whilst different musical moods require that some tracks should sound louder than others, the loudness of a given CD has more to do with the year of issue or the whim of the producer than the intended emotional effect. This difference carries over when you rip the CD to MP3 and random play through my music collection requires constant manual volume adjustment. This has been bugging me for a while now, but when it started to bug my wife I knew it was time to find a solution

My main concerns with applying some sort of audio normalisation were….

• My MP3s should not be irretrievably changed into something I end up hating.
• The method used should be free of the application used for music playback, given that I play my music on iPod Nano, iPod Shuffle, PSP, PS3, Linux desktops, TomTom 720T FM streaming and in car MP3 player.

After some research mp3gain seems to be the tool for the job which provides an implementation of ReplayGain.

However, as of today my entire CD collection is ripped, which is very large, so I needed a way to process my whole music collection in an automated fashion. I found some examples of how to script this, but there are caveats with the solutions I found.

Therefore I have created my own script, MP3Gainer, to apply ReplayGain using ‘mp3gain’ which overcomes these common limitations. MP3Gainer recursively applies ReplayGain to a MP3 music collection of any size and directory depth. ReplayGain can be applied in ‘track’ or ‘album’ mode and if ReplayGain has previously been applied it can also be undone. It is important to understand that MP3Gainer ‘album’ mode really is per album, which is what you want. Trust me!

This script works on Ubuntu Linux, should work on any other Linux/Unix flavour and possibly Mac OS X providing you have the required tools installed.

• MP3Gainer

This script works on Ubuntu Linux, should work on any other Linux/Unix flavour and possibly Mac OS X providing you have the required tools installed.

• See the Code section of my site for the download and more details.

Mp4-Repacker.sh was released on April 23rd 2009 to help celebrate St. George’s Day.

This script works on Ubuntu Linux, should work on any other Linux/Unix flavour and possibly Mac OS X providing you have the required tools installed.

• See the Code section of my site for the download and more details.

MKV-to-M2TS.sh was released on April 23rd 2009 to help celebrate St. George’s Day.

As a solution to the above I created this script, which can extract the main feature from a DVD video, allowing the user to select one audio stream and one subtitle stream. Optionally the video can be requantised, using M2VRequantiser, and an ISO image created. If creating an ISO image the chapters are also preserved from the original DVD.

• See the Code section of my site for the download and more details.

DVD-toMPG.sh was released on April 23rd 2009 to help celebrate St. George’s Day.

My script is called IMDB-to-MPEG and I’ve finally got round to uploading it. See the Code section of my site for the download.

The scripts takes one parameter as input, a film title. The plotline, year of release, genres, cast list and running time for that film are gathered from IMDB and formatted as text. Here is an example.

The Usual Suspects (1995)

A boat has been destroyed, criminals are dead, and
the key to this mystery lies with the only
survivor and his twisted, convoluted story
beginning with five career crooks in a seemingly
random police lineup. (106 mins)

Starring Stephen Baldwin as Michael McManus,
Gabriel Byrne as Dean Keaton, Benicio Del Toro as
Fred Fenster, Kevin Pollak as Todd Hockney, and
Kevin Spacey as Roger 'Verbal' Kint.

Genres: Crime, Mystery, Thriller.

Rated 8.7 out of 10 from 227,964 votes.

The text is converted into an image and then encoded into a MPEG-2 video using the lowest possible bitrate/resolution that is acceptable to read when viewing on a 42″ plasma from my sofa.

Directories for each matching genre are created and also one for the IMDB rating (rounded down). The MPEG-2 is stored in the ‘All’ folder and then symlinked to the genres and rating for that film. I then copy my video into the appropriate directory in ‘All’. For example.

.
|-- All
|   `-- The_Usual_Suspects
|       `-- About_The_Usual_Suspects.mpg
|-- Genres
|   |-- Crime
|   |   `-- The_Usual_Suspects -> ../../All/The_Usual_Suspects
|   |-- Mystery
|   |   `-- The_Usual_Suspects -> ../../All/The_Usual_Suspects
|   `-- Thriller
|       `-- The_Usual_Suspects -> ../../All/The_Usual_Suspects
|-- Ratings
`-- 8
`-- The_Usual_Suspects -> ../../All/The_Usual_Suspects

This code was lashed up in a few hours, it ain’t pretty but it works for me on my Ubuntu Linux systems, maybe it’ll work for you too

Anyway, I’m online again and I have been tinkering with various projects the most recent of which is Matroska conversion (again).  For sometime I have been converting Martoska files to MPEG-4 with AAC 5.1 audio so I can stream them via Mediatomb to my PS3. The conversion process works well although there is some overhead in transcoding the audio and the AAC 5.1 audio is not as good quality as the original AC3 or DTS. If you are interested I’ve posted my script which automates the whole process in the Code section of this site and you can find all the gory details on my Coverting MKV to MP4 wiki page.

A little while back I read it was possible to convert those same Matroska file to M2TS files which, so long as the audio is AC3, takes much less time to convert. As the PS3 can’t play DTS audio streams inside a M2TS container there is still a requirement to transcode DTS to Ac3. That said the conversion to M2TS requires less file I/O than converting to MPEG-4 and is therefore it is generally a quicker conversion method, typically just 2 or 3 minutes on my workstation at home. Plus the audio quality of the Ac3 or transcode DTS is better than that of transcoded AAC 5.1

I’ve created my own script to fully automate the conversion process. The script has been teston Ubuntu 81.0 64-bit but there is an outside chance it will work on Mac OS X if you can get the required tools installed. You can find my script and all the details on my Converting MKV to M2TS wiki page.