The Labs.Com Video Lab DVD Lab

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High Quality Digital Movie Format

1. Free DVD
2. Players
3. DeCSS
4. DVD to AVI
5. Authoring DVD with Open Source

During fall of 1999 a breakthrough of decrypting the DVD occured, it was just a matter of time some skilled people found a way to overcome that cumbersome and customer-unfriendly country-code setting and inability to make copies of DVDs (unlike VHS, music cassettes, or music CDs). That restrictive DVD copy-protection, along with non-support of LINUX and *BSD provoked that de-cryption effort:

OpenDVD.Org The resource-place

LinuxVideo.Org Primary site for LINUX DVD sources

DVD Lab 2. Players

DVD-movies I consider a rip-off in Europe pricewise, in the US DVD-movies are available for $10-$25 which is acceptable; I think the only movies worth to buy are "Odyssey 2001", "Lawrence of Arabia", and a few others as there the beauty of the pictures are worth the quality.

OGL DVD Player Swedish DVD (incl. CSS) player	XINE Video player (without CSS)	Captain CSS XINE plugin Plugin source for xine
XINE + CSS-DVD xine with css-plugin

Otherwise I don't see any need for DVDs (status March 2001) until real HDTV is coming (e.g. HDTV-720p: 1280x720, HDTV-1080i: 1920x1080), as standard DVD comes with 720x480 only. So, DVD is an obsolete "transitional" technology if you put aisde all the hype. "HD-DVD" might come soon (more info in the DVD-FAQ).

DVD Lab 3. DeCSS

A big fuss is made about the actual decss source-code, but who cares?

DeCSS.Com Primary site

DeCSS.zip & LiVid.tar.gz (via Google) Program which copies your DVD into non-encrypted form.

DeCSS Gallery Explore the many ways of decss.c

Note: It should be nothing illegal of having a program able to convert your legally bought DVD into an uncrypted format, and even make copies for your own; illegal is when you copy your DVD for others.

The funniest way (posted on /. and DeCSS Gallery) to retrieve the decss source-code goes this way

dig @138.195.138.195 goret.org. axfr | grep '^c..\..*A' | sort |\

cut -b5-36 | perl -e 'while(<>){print pack("H32",$_)}' | gzip -d

DVD Lab 4. DVD to AVI

Best use mplayer, which includes mencoder, to convert a DVD proceed like this:

DVD Disk:

mencoder -dvd 1 -ovc lavc -lavcopts vcodec=mpeg4:vhq:vbitrate=1000 -oac copy -vop scale -zoom -xy 720 -o my_movie.avi

Instead of -dvd 1 use 2, 3 etc to select the correct title-id, you can also use -dvd 1-4.

VOB Files:

mencoder -ovc lavc -lavcopts vcodec=mpeg4:vhq:vbitrate=1000 -oac copy -vop scale -zoom -xy 720 *.VOB -o my_movie.avi

Best first try with mplayer to play the *.VOB files, if you get commentary audio track instead of the original audio track, use -aid 128 (128-159) until you got the correct track.

DVD Lab 5. Authoring DVD with Open Source

If you like to author a DVD with menu, buttons and content, check out those few sites:

DVDAuthor Open Source, custom navigation, animated menus etc	DVD Slideshow Turn your pictures into a DVD with menus	DVDStyler GUI frontend for dvdauthor
Linux Journal: DVD Authoring Illustrated guide	Gentoo: DVD Authoring Useful guide for LINUX

                                                                                                                                   

Perl Flash

Video Lab