DVD 2 VCD (UNIX)

[ibinder]

Hi,

Is there softwares to rip and convert DVD to VCD on a UNIX server (Solaris 7 or 8)?

Right now I'm using dvd2svcd on Windows, but I want to run it on a UNIX server due to better hardware which will make things run much fster.

I could not find something like that.

Thanks,
Idan

[sterno]

I think most people on UNIX platforms use transcode (http://www.theorie.physik.uni-goettingen.de/~ostreich/transcode/) for MPEG encoding. vcdimager (http://www.vcdimager.org/) is probably the best tool for VCD authoring, it's UNIX-native and was ported to Windows with cygwin32. Same for MJPEG Tools (http://mjpeg.sourceforge.net/), which you can use to create MPEG stills. dvd::rip (http://www.exit1.org/dvdrip/) provides a perl/GTK (so you'd have to install both) graphical front-end to the common tools. I'm not sure about actually ripping the DVD in Solaris, though.

A lot of those things say "Linux" but most of them probably don't use anything Linux-specific (tools to actually rip the VOBs off the DVD might, since they may deal with the hardware at a pretty low level). You probably do need gmake and gcc to compile, though. I wouldn't expect any of those programs to be available at sunfreeware.com, though some or all of the tools (like gcc and gmake) and libraries they depend on probably are.

It may or may not actually be faster, probably none of the tools are optimized for SPARC chips. If they have any optimizations it's likely to be in the form of x86 inline assembly. You may also find that some tools don't work unless you have x86+MMX because they use inline assembly and didn't bother to provide generic C versions.