This script helps convert video from one format to another. It is useful for ripping DVDs to mpeg4 videos (XviD, DivX). Basically, it is a wizard around mplayer/mencoder.

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License: MIT style

Free, open source, and all that good stuff.

Permission is hereby granted, free of charge, to any person obtaining a copy of this software and associated documentation files (the "Software"), to deal in the Software without restriction, including without limitation the rights to use, copy, modify, merge, publish, distribute, sublicense, and/or sell copies of the Software, and to permit persons to whom the Software is furnished to do so, subject to the following conditions:

The above copyright notice and this permission notice shall be included in all copies or substantial portions of the Software.

THE SOFTWARE IS PROVIDED "AS IS", WITHOUT WARRANTY OF ANY KIND, EXPRESS OR IMPLIED, INCLUDING BUT NOT LIMITED TO THE WARRANTIES OF MERCHANTABILITY, FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE AND NONINFRINGEMENT. IN NO EVENT SHALL THE AUTHORS OR COPYRIGHT HOLDERS BE LIABLE FOR ANY CLAIM, DAMAGES OR OTHER LIABILITY, WHETHER IN AN ACTION OF CONTRACT, TORT OR OTHERWISE, ARISING FROM, OUT OF OR IN CONNECTION WITH THE SOFTWARE OR THE USE OR OTHER DEALINGS IN THE SOFTWARE.

Copyright (c) 2006 Noah Spurrier

Download

Download the current version here from the SourceForge site.

Install

Simply open the tarball:

tar zxf rippy-1.2.tgz

This is a compressed python executable. It's magic! Just do 'tar zxf rippy-1.2.tgz' and you should get an executable called 'rippy'. Run this directly. There is nothing to install. You may copy this to /usr/local/bin/rippy if you want to "install" it. The only system dependency is Python 2.3 or better and mplayer/mencoder 1.0pre8 or better. The old 1.0pre7try2 could not generate AVI files with MP3 audio.

Documentation

This script helps to convert video from one format to another. This is useful for ripping DVD to mpeg4 video (XviD, DivX).

Features:

* automatic crop detection
* mp3 audio compression with resampling options
* automatic bitrate calculation based on desired target size
* optional interlace removal, b/w video optimization, video scaling

Run the script with no arguments to start with interactive prompts:

rippy.py

Run the script with the filename of a config to start automatic mode:

rippy.py rippy.conf

After Rippy is finished it saves the current configuation in a file called 'rippy.conf' in the local directoy. This can be used to rerun process using the exact same settings by passing the filename of the conf file as an argument to Rippy. Rippy will read the options from the file instead of asking you for options interactively. So if you run rippy with 'dry_run=1' then you can run the process again later using the 'rippy.conf' file. Don't forget to edit 'rippy.conf' to set 'dry_run=0'!

If you run rippy with 'dry_run' and 'verbose' true then the output generated is valid command line commands. you could (in theory) cut-and-paste the commands to a shell prompt. You will need to tweak some values such as crop area and bit rate because these cannot be calculated in a dry run. This is useful if you want to get an idea of what Rippy plans to do.

For all the trouble that Rippy goes through to calculate the best bitrate for a desired target video size it sometimes fails to get it right. Sometimes the final video size will differ more than you wanted from the desired size, but if you are really motivated and have a lot of time on your hands then you can run Rippy again with a manually calculated bitrate. After all compression is done the first time Rippy will recalculate the bitrate to give you the nearly exact bitrate that would have worked. You can then edit the 'rippy.conf' file; set the video_bitrate with this revised bitrate; and then run Rippy all over again. There is nothing like 4-pass video compression to get it right! Actually, this could be done in three passes since I don't need to do the second pass compression before I calculate the revised bitrate. I'm also considering an enhancement where Rippy would compress ten spread out chunks, 1-minute in length to estimate the bitrate.

Requirements

Python at least version 2.3
mencoder and mplayer 1.0pre8 or better. The old 1.0pre7try2 could not generate mpeg4 video with mp3 audio

TO DO