[Linux] Journal.

Here’s a good thread on dealing with cue files. I had a cue file which contains a kvcd image. I tried cdemu, bchunk, bin2iso and nothing worked. I was mostly getting ioctl: LOOP_CLR_FD: Device or resource busy when I tried to mount the image.

In the end, vcdgear was what worked for me, it could [...]

Rip DVD
dvdbackup & vobcopy are both simple tools to rip a DVD:

$ dvdbackup -i /dev/dvd -M -o output_dir
# -M mirrors the DVD image, use -F to copy main features only
$ vobcopy -i /dev/dvd -m

Side note, vobcopy couldn’t handle DVD directory structure in lowercase, dvdbackup could.
Encode DVD
For encoding a ripped (or not) DVD [...]

Here’s a nice guide on configuring USE flag for mplayer, I enabled the following in global:

USE=”xinerama mmx sse sse2 cdr dvd dvdread divx4linux vcd xvid win32codecs flac”

and mplayer specific:

media-libs/win32codecs real quicktime
media-video/mplayer mmx2 dts -real

vlc advices to always use the unstable version, and to compile with the following USE flags:

media-video/vlc ffmpeg wxwindows aac dts a52 theora [...]

Xmms has a mp4/aac plugin to play m4a files: apt-get install xmms-mp4

Symptom: MPlayer found the subtitle file but was not showing subtitles during playback. It gave the error message:

Please supply the text font file (~/.mplayer/subfont.ttf).
subtitle font: load_sub_face failed.

Fix: apt-get install mplayer-fonts.

Symptom: MPlayer plays quicktime files with video but no sound.
Fix: apt-get install w32codecs.