dvd2mkv magic
My little dvd2mkv script is coming along. You can actually pop in a DVD, run the script and come back a few hours later and you’ll have a nice shiny Matroska file complete with chapters and all. I’m actually pretty proud of it, even though there is still a lot of bugs, and you can’t do the main feature I wanted yet, which is to queue movies.
The good thing though is that it’s down to mostly fixing bugs and fixing code far more than it is adding features and just plain getting it to work. That’s a good milestone, I’d say.
One thing I like a lot about it is I’m just plain learning to write some better code. This is my first really interactive php shell script, and writing the backend, I keep finding better ways to clean it up and make the code tighter.
Just running an interactive script by itself is very cool. I was really surprised when I found out how easy it was.
The hardest part in all of this has been the transcode arguments. Actually, the first 85% or so of it was really simple, using dvd::rip as a reference and then reading up on the excellent transcode man pages. Transcode comes with some really good tools, and I still prefer it over MEncoder even though it (mplayer) would make things generally *so* much simpler. For instance, I already prefer tcprobe to midentify as getting me some really good valid data. That’s not a fair comparison, I know, since they both return different types of data. I’ll probably end up using them both. Right now I rely heavily on them both. Mplayer to rip the VOB, transcode to encode it to an XviD, and in the future tcprobe to make sure I’m doing things right. 
Good stuff.