[mythtvnz] Importing videos..

[Aaron Whitehouse]

On Fri, Jan 1, 2010 at 12:06 PM, Stuart Whelan
<mythtv at somepointinthefuture.co.nz> wrote:

>> I have a whole lot of episode DVD's that I have previously ripped
>> using dvdshrink and import into my mythtv system.
>> The rips consist of a VIDEO_TS folder with .vob, .bup and .ifo files.

While this is unlikely to help you now, you may find it easier in the
future to deal with DVD rips as iso files, rather than DVD folders.  I
have never had any issues dealing with iso files in mythtv after
simply putting them in the video folder.  There may be an easy way to
create iso images and put the directories into them.  I have never
tried working with DVD directories, though, so ignore me if this is
already working fine and your question is how to access them from
multiple frontends.

The key issue is that multiple frontends can only access videos in
"storage groups", which, in 0.22, can only support video files and not
isos.  This means that you have two options for DVD rips:
1) put them in the video folder and not use storage groups (using
something like NFS or Samba to share the folder for multiple
frontends); or
2) rip the files to a video file that is supported by MythTV and
storage groups (and supports subtitles).

If you go for option 2, Nick's mkv files may be a good option, though
I have never used them.  Obviously, it would be easier and produce
better videos if the original DVDs were used to rip to files, rather
than the DVDshrink rips.  Alternatively, have a look at the formats
that handbrake can spit out:
http://handbrake.fr/
as it has some very flexible output options for subtitles:
http://trac.handbrake.fr/wiki/Subtitles
and can use folders from DVDs as a source:
http://trac.handbrake.fr/wiki/Sources

Subtitles (as it sounds like you realise) make things difficult as
very few video formats support them properly.

(Note for the archives: there are many, many DVD-ripping programs that
support DVD folders, which would be fine in situations where subtitles
were not important.  One example is Thoggen, which supports outputting
to Free formats.)

Regards,

Aaron


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