DVD to MKV with mencoder confusion

Question

I apologize in advance if the questions that follow seem trivial.  I've read the relevant wiki article which only created more questions.  I understand the concept of mkv as a container similar to avi for video and audio files.  The wiki article provides the following example for encoding a single title/chapter with h264 into a .avi file for use in a mkv file.
#First passage: we are just collecting informations so the normal output is thrown away.
mencoder -dvd-device "$ISO" dvd://"$TITLE" -chapter "$CHAPTER" -o /dev/null -nosound -ovc x264 \
-x264encopts direct=auto:pass=1:turbo:bitrate=900:bframes=1:\
me=umh:partitions=all:trellis=1:qp_step=4:qcomp=0.7:direct_pred=auto:keyint=300 \
-vf scale=-1:-10,harddup
#Second passage: here we compress the video track using the informations from the first step.
mencoder -dvd-device "$ISO" dvd://"$TITLE" -chapter "$CHAPTER" -nosound -ovc x264 \
-x264encopts direct=auto:pass=2:bitrate=900:frameref=5:bframes=1:\
me=umh:partitions=all:trellis=1:qp_step=4:qcomp=0.7:direct_pred=auto:keyint=300 \
-vf scale=-1:-10,harddup -o video.avi
My first question would then be, how can I simply rip the entire DVD, including menus, into a single .avi file that will later be encapsulated with mkv?  This doesn't seem to be a problem with audio files, as mkvmerge allows for several audio track entries to be passed in the merge process:
mkvmerge -D audio.avi -A video.avi -o mymovie.mkv
Or do I have it all wrong?  Will I need to encode each chapter/title and corresponding audio track into an mkv and then merge the final mkv files into a single mkv?  Finally, how can I read a DVD disk or ISO file to view the chapter/title information?
Any and all advice is greatly appreciated.  Thanks!
Last edited by wreck (2009-06-30 04:07:59)

Answer 1

not sure if this will help, but here goes anyway.
a while back a wrote a script that copies a standard dvd to disc, compresses the video via mencoder, then authors a new 4.3 GB dvd to be burnt.  very useful.
anyhow, part of this process involved extracting chapter and title info.  i didn't use mencoder or mkvtoolnix but here's what i did do:
DEV="/dev/sr0"
WD="/tmp/ripping"
# extract title info into a file
vobcopy -I $DEV > $WD/title.txt 2>&1
# find the longest title from looking at that file
TITLE=$(awk '/Most\ chapters/ {print $6}' $WD/title.txt)
# extract the chapter info into another file
tcprobe -i $DEV -T $TITLE -d 8 > $WD/probe.txt 2>&1
# get the chapter markings by looking at that file
egrep "\[Chapter ..\] " $WD/probe.txt | cut -d " " -f 4
Last edited by brisbin33 (2009-06-30 19:16:35)