So I get a week off, and what really needs to be done?!? I’ve been noticing the deterioration of my massive, 200+, DVD collection which contains ALL my former concerts, ensembles, studio recitals, grad recitals etc…<\/p>\n
This of course is very precious to me and maintaining my data\/media is always a balance of: newest and greatest way, good compression, high quality audio and video, longevity, and last but not least convenience.<\/p>\n
For a long time now, the best option for me has been a transfer to the DVD format, and I have well over 200+ DVD vids of our concerts. I’ve been watching video codecs with hope, and finally with h264 and aac I have to say it really is incredible quality at a highly compressed bitrate.<\/p>\n
So with the h264 (x264 in linux) codec (the video\/size ratio is very good) and my dying DVDs, I decided to get this done, and I’ve learnt a few key commands that I’d like to share with whoever will listen. I’ll break it into steps:<\/p>\n
1) Getting the info off the disc
\nSince these are all personal discs, a conversation about libdvdcss as it’s not needed. There are two good ways of doing this (the former is quicker, while the latter is far better at regaining lost data<\/p>\nddrescue works really well if there are no\/few problems with the disc (free from scratches):
\ndd_rescue -n -b 2048 \/dev\/cdrom dvd.iso<\/p>\ndd can be brutally slow, but gets everything:
\ndd if=\/dev\/cdrom of=dvd.iso conv=noerror,sync<\/p><\/blockquote>\n2) joining VOBs
\nThere are two ways to do this too. I’ll give the most logical and easiest first although I notice no difference at all between the two.<\/p>\nuse cat:
\ncat VTS_01_1.VOB VTS_01_2.VOB VTS_01_3.VOB > combined.vob<\/p>\nuse ffmpeg (you need 1.1 or newer for concat):
\nffmpeg -i concat:VTS_01_1.VOB\\|VTS_01_2.VOB\\|VTS_01_3.VOB -c copy combined.vob<\/p>\nOne neat thing about the ffmpeg command is you can include everything else and come up with a finished product like:
\nffmpeg -i concat:VTS_01_1.VOB\\|VTS_01_2.VOB\\|VTS_01_3.VOB -c:v libx264 -crf 23 -c:a libfaac -ac 2 -ab 192k finished-video.mp4<\/p><\/blockquote>\n3) Encoding video
\nI use ffmpeg for this:
\nffmpeg -i combined.vob -c:v libx264 -crf 23 -c:a libfaac -ac 2 -ab 192k test.mp4<\/p>\nto break this last example down:
\n-i combined.vob -> is the concatted vob file
\n-c:v libx264 -> this is the codec (x264)
\n-crf 23 -> this is how you set the constant quality, a lower number means higher quality, bigger file
\n-c:a libfaac -> audio codec (faac)
\n-ac 2 -> stereo sound (channels = 2)
\n-ab 192k -> the audio bitrate, higher is better\/bigger<\/p><\/blockquote>\nand that’s pretty much it. For a 1 hour concert at 720p I’m getting about a 500-600mb file which is really good, and I’m using all open source software. I’m plowing through these videos, getting them backed up and safe. As soon as I complete this, the next stage is to run out to pick up a new 2TB HD, copy the files to that and move them offsite (just in case the house burns down…. you can NEVER be too safe with your data!<\/p>\n
I like the quote: <\/p>\n
“There are two types of people in this world, those who have lost data, and those who are going to lose data”<\/p><\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
So I get a week off, and what really needs to be done?!? I’ve been noticing the deterioration of my massive, 200+, DVD collection which contains ALL my former concerts, ensembles, studio recitals, grad recitals etc… This of course is very precious to me and maintaining my data\/media is always a balance of: newest and […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":509,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3,5,6],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-641","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-guitar","category-linux","category-music"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/eugenecormier.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/641","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/eugenecormier.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/eugenecormier.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/eugenecormier.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/eugenecormier.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=641"}],"version-history":[{"count":5,"href":"http:\/\/eugenecormier.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/641\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":646,"href":"http:\/\/eugenecormier.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/641\/revisions\/646"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/eugenecormier.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/509"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/eugenecormier.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=641"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/eugenecormier.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=641"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/eugenecormier.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=641"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}