Extracting Music From A DVD

DeepGeek

Abstract: This is a script for a podcast. This podcast shows how the command line options for the software mplayer, HandBrakeCLI, and oggenc, can be put together to create music off of a DVD. I make the disclaimer that when I put this together it was with legally obtained music, and I have the expectation that this procedure will be put to legal use by my audience.

Introduction

I recently bought a DVD of a band I like in concert, but what I really wanted was an added feature of some of them doing their songs acoustically. After enjoying these videos of them doing their hits songs acoustically, I wanted to be able to just play the music, as in on my portable digital music player.

I developed a way of extracting music from DVDs using the following programs, handbrake, mplayer, oggenc.

Handbrake

Handbrake is a wonderful tool to convert files on a DVD to something on your disk. I use the word “something,” because it can do a variety of formats. What is really nice about Handbrake, though, is that it can derive sensible defaults from file extensions. I use mplayer, and I do have it’s encoding brother-program mencoder installed. But mencoder has a few problems for me. Mencoder insists you specify both the audio as well as the video codec. I can’t keep these things separate in my head, so I would rather just say “give me a dot-AVI file,” and let it decide what to do. Also, mplayer and mencoder seem to have a problem is compression settings change from chapter to chapter in a DVD, while Handbrake seems more robust in handling it.

mplayer

Mplayer is really a media player. It plays movie files, DVDs, VCD’s, and sound files. Mplayer is known for it’s ability not to care about format, as long as you take the time to add all the possible codecs to your computer. For maximum use on a Debian system, install the packages W32codecs or w64codecs (each one for either a 32 or 64 bit system,) and libdvdcss2. These codecs don’t meet the Debian Free Software Guidelines. But, if you add debian-mulitmedia.org to your apt package system, they become available. See www.debian-multimedia.org for details.

Mplayer can take video files and extract the audio only from them with switches. I touched on this audio capability when I reviewed the Olympus WS-500, and now we see another use for this function.

oggenc

Oggenc is the free ogg/vorbis encoder included in the vorbis-tools package, and is the way to make ogg files. The package vorbis-tools also includes other great ogg tools that will split oggs, decode oggs, and a really versatile command line player called ogg123, which can also handle playing flac and speex files.

The Procedure

This is a multi-step process, so be patient, and if you really want to do this, the script for this podcast spells out the commands and can be found at the website www.talkgeektome.us.

First, launch mplayer, then right-click on the display window and choose “open disk” under the DVD sub-menu. Choose the title and make note of the chapters which have the songs you wish to capture.

Now it is time to get those DVD chapters off of the DVD and onto the disk drive. The command I ofter use is:

HandBrakeCLI -t 1 -c 3 -i /dev/hda -o music.avi

Let’s look at the parts of this complicated command. First off, I spun my wheels quite a bit when, after installing handbrakecli, it took me a while to figure out that they used capitalization in the command name, which really threw me for a few loops. The command name is “HandBrakeCLI” with the H, the B, and the CLI capitalized. This is the command line version of handbrake, there is also a gui version, but for something like this I like to do the command from a x-term. The “Dash-t” indicates the title on the DVD, while the “dash-c” is the chapter. The “dash-i” and “dash-o” are input and output files respectively. When you run this command it will create an avi file on your disk, which is the music video you chose by knowing the title and chapter for it.

The second step is using mplayer to get the audio out of the music video you have captured. To do this, you can use the command:

mplayer -vo null -ao pcm:fast:file=music.wav music.avi

To pull the option of this command apart, the “dash-vo” says “no video output,” the -ao has three parts, the first is pcm which tells it to make the proper headers in the wav file, the fast option says don’t play it in real time, but rather go through it at high speed, and the last specifies the output file. Finally, you have the name of the input file.

The third step is to encode that wav file into a useful ogg file, this is the easiest command, you just do a:

oggenc music.wav

and oggenc will give you, a little bit later, “music.ogg.”

Conclusion

I know I went over it very tersely, but I really felt that making it a whole hand-holding affair would make it seem a lot more complicated than it really is. Also, this show is not really aimed at the beginner Linux audience, so I did not go into things like the format of the DVD, or the different options of the commands. I have confidence in the ability that my listeners have shown in the past to bring themselves up by their bootstraps, if only given the concepts of a process. I know if you eye that music DVD on a shelf, and say “I bet I can do that,” and begin futzing around with these commands, that you will get the basics down. Based on our past email exchanges, I also believe you will read help pages and web pages on the commands and come up with nuances that will fit you like a glove.

Talk Geek To Me

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