bend / dvd2mkv madness
You know you’ve been neglecting your pet project for a while when you try to run it and your system is missing one of the required libraries. Whoops.
Just yesterday I found a program that is going to help me a lot with the project. Ogle to the rescue, again. libdvdread comes with a binary called ‘disc_id’ which gives a unique identifier for a DVD. That is a godsend, since my way of getting a “unique” identifier for the discs was to read the disc title and then check it against a regular expression pattern in my database of possible values for titles. Needless to say, a 32 number hash is much simpler.
So, I’ve started plugging away at it again. It’s safe to say that this little script needs a lot of work. But in its most basic form, it works perfectly well once you get it setup. The backend is a still an utter and complete mess though. I’ve gone from writing it in a class to procedural back to a class. Oy. And I haven’t commented things very well, and it’s very confusing when I try to find why something’s not working right. I’m still really excited about it though.
I think one main thing I need to do (besides actually publically releasing it) is get a little text interface going, similar to nuvexport. That way you won’t have to do something like bend –archive –title “Malcolm in the Middle” –rip –encode. I’ve also thought about rewriting it in bash, but it’d be a pain the arse right now, since I don’t know any bash programming. It would cut down on the very strict level of dependencies though — right now it requires PHP 5.1.0 and PostgreSQL. Ah well. Someday. 