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. 🙂