Ripping DVDs to VCD and AVI to VCD with mencvcd (Linux)

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http://dvdripping-guid.berlios.de/DVDs-to-VCD_y_AVI-to-VCD_con_mencvcd_en.html

by xevian (xevian@iespana.es) translated by paranouei

News(20/01/2003): New forum available. You can ask there your questions about this guide. (NB, it's abandoned forum, the newest post on it is on Feb 02, 2003, titled "mencvcd installation")

Be have seen before how to rip a DVD to Divx, now we are going to see how to rip a DVD to VCD, and to transcode an AVI to VCD. You may wonder why we want to do this. There are DVD players which can play Divx, but the majority of them can't, but almost all of them can play DVD and SVCD. We are gonna focus on VCD, because it has smaller size than SVCD.

The main tool for this is mencvcd, and you can find it in mjpegtools package -> Downloads (side menu) -> Tarballs -> mjpegtools_1.6.1-1_debsrc.tar.gz (7.8Mb). The version may be newer and the size may be different. You will see there are many files with the same version but smaller, the reason this file is bigger it's because it includes some libraries and utils we are gonna use like "libmovtar", "quicktime4linux", "jpeg-mmx", "mjpegtools". Once you've got the file, do ./configure. When it finishes, you will see a summary with the available libraries. I'm not going to say how you can get them all, because it will take so long, but it's not so hard, I did it in half an hour (and that's because I've got a modem).

Well, so now we have mpegtools installed, so we have the mencvcd command at our disposition. If you execute the program without parameters, you will see some examples of how to use it to transcode AVI to VCD or DVD to VCD. I'll past them here with one more example:

Some options:

To choose the language we need the option -alang <language>:

o -alang es (spanish audio)
o -alang hu,en (hungarian, but if there isn't, take english)

To choose the subtitles we use the option -sid <subtitle number> (there is another option to take subtitles from a different file, but I haven't done it, anyway, we'll see later how to do it.):
```
o -sid 0 (the first language subtitles)
o -sid 1 (the second language subtitles)
```

If you want to know which number is each language, you have to look at mplayer output. You can grep the output so you see only what you need. For instance, greping "sid" you will see all the subtitles with its number (0=en (english); 1=es (espanol…). Greping "aid" you'll see the audio languages:

xxxxx@xxxxx$ mplayer -dvd 1 -vo null -ao null -frames 0 -v 2>&1 | grep sid
[open] subtitle ( sid ): 0 language: en
[open] subtitle ( sid ): 1 language: es
[open] subtitle ( sid ): 2 language: pt
[open] subtitle ( sid ): 3 language: iw
[open] subtitle ( sid ): 4 language: pl
[open] subtitle ( sid ): 5 language: el
[open] subtitle ( sid ): 6 language: cs
[open] subtitle ( sid ): 7 language: tr
[open] subtitle ( sid ): 8 language: hu
[open] subtitle ( sid ): 9 language: hr
xxxxx@xxxxx$ mplayer -dvd 1 -vo null -ao null -frames 0 -v 2>&1 | grep aid
[open] audio stream: 0 audio format: ac3 (5.1) language: en aid: 128
[open] audio stream: 1 audio format: ac3 (5.1) language: es aid: 129
xxxxx@xxxxx$

mencvcd matrix matrix.avi

This will create a VCD from an AVI, there are no format options because it takes them from the AVI file. It takes some time, about the double of the movie time. At the end it creates two image files. When it finishes it will say "Insert a CD and press a key", then just put a CD, hit a key, and it will burn the VCD and ask you for another one when it finishes.

mencvcd matrix -dvd 3 -w

It will transcode the VCDs from title 3 from the DVD (sometimes the first titles are trailers, adverts, and stuff like that), in 16:9 format (that's the -w option for). After a long time, it will ask you the CDs again and burn them.

mencvcd prueba -vfr 2 -vnorm p -w /opt/glftpd/site/video/requiem_for_a_dream/rfad.avi -sub /opt/glftpd/site/video/requiem_for_a_dream/rfad.srt

This is an example of creating the VCD with the subtitles in a different file. The path to the subtitle file is set by -sub option.