The Drip Howto

for easy DVD to DIVX conversion!


 
 
 

General Introduction
Dependencies
Installation
How to use Drip
 
 
 
 
 

General Introduction to Drip

Drip is a tool for Unix like OSs to convert the content of a DVD disk to a portable format. Drip utilises libraries like libavifile, libmpeg2, libac52, opendivx and libdvdread for DVD to DIVX conversion.

Drip is made by Jarl van Katwijk, and published under the General Public License.
Drip doesn't supports NTSC DVD's very well. PAL DVDs shouldn't give a problem.

Drip is published under the General Public License.
You can visit the drip Home page under drip.sourceforge.net
 
 
 
 

Dependencies of Drip

Drip depends on these five tools. Use lastest of given version number:
avifile-0.6.0cvs for encoding to divx
libdvdread for reading DVD disks
libdvdcss for 'handling' most streams 
automake 1.5 for compilation
gnome  a recent stable gnome environment.

That should do it! Just don't forget the Windows DLLs of avifile is you want to encode to the (old) divx3 format! (If you make a test run with avifile and it works everything should be fine.) Note avifile-0.6cvs supports opendivx encoding, and so does Drip since 0.6.6. Encoding by the opendivx codec is not compatible with the 'old' MSMPEG4 divx, but it doesn't requiere and Win32 dll. This is the prefered setup: encode to opendivx with the natif linux codecs, and dont use the win32 stuff at all.
 
   
 
 

Installation of Drip

To install Drip just type:

./configure
make
su -
make install

That should do fine! For more detailed Introductions read the "INSTALL" file in the Tar ball.
 
 
 
 
 

How to use Drip

To use Drip to encode a DVD to DivX just type "drip" in a terminal of your gnome Desktop.
Under Preferences there are several things you can change. We will do that first, because its important for the encoding afterwards.

Use DVDrom Device, that should be /dev/cdrom in most cases, or /dev/dvd. If you're lucky Drip will auto detect your DVD device.

Use Drip Cache is used if you want to generate a DIVX file out of plain (unencrypted) mpeg2 files that are stored somewhere on your file system. Use full path names for the locations, like /opt/storage/. Make sure the cache location does exists and is filled with plain, unencrypted mpeg2 streams and the .IFO files. Have a look a the cache Drip creates when it reads from a DVD..

DivX

- Filename of the encoded DivX, I think that is clear! :-)
- Width and Height is to change the size of the Movie. Use -1 to keep the size unchanged. Values of 500x400 help reducing size without decreasing the resolution too much.
- Video Bit rate changes the Bit rate of the DivX movie. Anything below 800 makes a really bad quality. Something between 1100 and 1500
should do great. Great in size too, for 90-100 minutes feed this bit rate generates output for 2 CD's,
around 1.5Gb. A bit rate setting of 800-1000 generates acceptable quality , and used for 90-100 minutes input it could fit on 1 CD. Use the Calculate Bit rate dialog to help you gamble the optimal bit rate setting ;)
- Audio Bit rate is 'Auto' only, this means Drip will encode the output audio stream 1:1 with the input. Other values result into an out of sync between the audio and video.
- Max size of output chunks in MB If you plan to burn the DivX Movie on CD afterwards you should set this to 695 for 80 minutes CD-R's or ?595? for 70mins. Drip will make output cut into chunks if the movie grows bigger as the maximum size.
- Number of lines to clip The encoder will cut off this number of lines from the top/bottom.  Enable Auto Clipping and Drip will determine the clip values itself.
If the center isn't in the middle, you can change the center of the film by this option.
- Radius of blur filter The film will be blurred by the radius of pixels entered here. Useful for low quality input or for cartoons that are encoded at low bit rates. Regular movies at high bit rates should not be blurred. Cartoons or very low quality input might benefid by blurring.
- Deinterlace PAL video When the video looks all stripped it probably is prepared for TV. To view this on a digital medium the video needs to have this TV preparation remove.

Various

- Eject DVD Ejects the Disk after it's been used.
- Nice Value Changes the priority of drip. -20 is the highest priority and 19 the lowest.
- Cache MPEG2 streams to HD before encoding makes a mpeg file of the movie first and starts encoding afterwards. Please do enable this when you got enough HD space, it's much less hard on your DVDrom device as non cached encoding.
(Remember that an uncompressed film has a big size, around 5-7 Gb !)
- Encode DVD mpeg2 streams to DIVX selected will encode the DVD mpeg2 streams to DIVX. This option enables 'Cache mpeg2 streams to HD before encoding' automatically. Not selecting this option will just cache the DVD and quit, so you can watch the original high quality mpeg2. Or encode on another machine..
- Make ISO images out of generated DIVX files will run 'mkisofs -J -l' on all divx files generated during encoding. If you are to burn the divx file to cdrom, this option makes life just a little bit more easy.
- Decoding CPUs the number of cpu's used for the decoding of the input mpeg2 streams. The encoding to divx takes about 8-9 times longer as the decoding and will just use one cpu. Hopefully the encoding library will support SMP in the future too.
- Delete cache on exit will do as it says. Don't select this if you want to keep the mpeg2 streams on HD for some reason.
- Debug logging to screen show all the log entries in the GUI, about 2x the amount you'll normally see.
 

Start encoding!
In usual all you have to do now is to click the RIP-DVD button and leave you PC alone for the next 5-8 hours. If you only want some of the scenes, you can select them using the select button. In some special cases, it wont work if you just use the RIP-DVD button, especially when there is more than just the film on the DVD. Then just use the select button and deselect the files that wont work. (Usually they have a size of 0 ).

Audio and subpicture selection is available once you started the encoding procedure and when the DVD contains more than 1 audio channel or 1 or more subpictures. Drip will popup a dialog where you can select the languages you want. TODO Drip is not able yet to find out what the names of non-English audio are, so you have to find that out yourself. Subpictures are rendered into the video stream: no OCR or separate subpicture files are used.

During the encoding process you'll get some files in the directory where Drip was started. In direct, non cached, encoding, you'll get these:

Pi-10000-128.avi     <- The output file. Here the movie Pi is being backed up. A must see movie ;)
dripencoder.ior          <- Drip internal file used for the GUI->encoder corba communications.
dripgui.ior                 <- Drip internal file, used for the encoder->GUI corba communications.

In HD cached mode you'll also get these files: 

CLUT.tbl                    - Colour information for subpictures (64bytes)
DVDTITLE.tbl           - Description of the cache, used by drip when the cache is used as source
dripcache_01_0.vob    - cached content files
dripcache_01_1.vob
dripcache_01_2.vob
 


Have a lot of fun!







Drip has been developed by Jarl van Katwijk
and this Howto has been written by Jan Witte
Revision 4 - 15-8-2001