OK it was my birthday last weekend, and got a late arriving present on Friday, a DVD boxed set of BBC 1970’s comedy “The Goodies” (RIP Tim Brooke-Taylor - Covid19 victim : Corona - you were supposed to take Bojo but spare TBT!) - but I don’t have an optical drive in my newly built desktop machine…
I do have a Bluray / DVD burner in my old machine (which is still turned on but running “headless”) - and - I don’t want one either (i.e. I don’t want to remove it and install it in the new desktop - the ony moving parts in it are the fans) - and I’ve also got a couple of external USB DVD drives - and I don’t want to use them either…
What I’d like to do is RIP them to mp4/mkv and watch them - but - I’d prefer to do that using the CLI (from my headless old desktop).
Found this (but can’t get it to work - something to do with “titles” on the DVD disk maybe?) :
Which also references Handbrake-CLI… Tried that and it doesn’t work either (probably DVD titles again).
Any ideas… I’m inherently lazy - so I may end up just hooking up an external DVD player (if I can find either of them - had a quick look amongst my pile of old junk and couldn’t find them) and watching it via VLC…
But I HATE DVD menus and all that crap - I’d rather just watch a batch of MP4/MKV files stored on my NAS…
I guess there’s also the option of using something like DVD backup and creating ISO’s - but like I said - I want to avoid DVD menus…
If you say, the two programs you tried (Handbrake and dvdrip) “don’t work”, what do you mean by that?
Do the programs not start? Don’t they recognize the disk structure?
Does the handbrake GUI work? I have copied a lot of disks (only DVDs, I don’t have a BluRay player) with it.
I don’t think, the DVD titles are the problem. My guess is that your disks have some copy protection.
That’s what I’m thinking too (first impression).
Our classical “Digital Restrictions Management” hell…
The hint from @clatterfordslim may help out (if that’s the issue)
I suspect that too… I can play them in VLC after installing a bunch of DVD stuff an codecs (funny I thought proprietary codecs during installation of Ubuntu took care of all that guff) and hooking up external USB DVD drive…
So - I suspect copy protection garbage is preventing me from using Handbrake-CLI to do basic things like even scan the disk for information (like show me chapters et cetera)…
Way more trouble than it’s worth… One episode is black and white and very lo-fi (BBC infamously erase literally thousands of miles of video tape back in the day) - looks like NTSC converted to PAL and running at 320-240 resolution…
Also - I could have sworn I’d told my daughters I don’t want any more optical media… oh well… seriously considering junking ALL my DVDs, BluRays, PC-Games and Audio-CD jewell cases, and boxing up the discs and paper liners to save on space…
And what I don’t have in digital format - I’ll just grab less-than-legit soft-copies for my hard disk / NAS (i.e. from the likes of my friendly neighbourhood Pir8bay )…
Sometimes with DVD protection, the likes of Handbrake cannot handle it isn’t kept up to date where DVD security is concerned. Have you tried the GUI version? As maybe that has more, than the CLI version?
Which Linux Mint? I’m using XFCE and it works with above commands. Maybe change your local update mirror to something closer to you? But then again no matter which Linux Mint Environment it should work. Also have a look in Synaptic it should be there.
)…
FWIW, my mirrors are local. Thanks!