Introduction
Have you ever wanted an easy way to turn audio tracks of DVD video into mp3s? Do you have concert DVDs that you would rather listen to than watch? Well dvd2mp3 may be for you.
This program is a simple perl script which uses several other tools to turn the audio tracks of DVDs into mp3s that include id3 tags. Unfortunately, I do not know of any database similar to CDDB/FreeDB for DVDs, so the program prompts the user for the necessary for song names, band names, etc.
This program was written for Linux, but I beleive that it should run under other Unixes with little trouble. It is also possible that it would run under Windows, but there it liekly will take a little effort to get it working.
Note that this program does not work for DVD-audio. I don't have any of those discs, so I have not tried to support them.
Dependencies
Several other programs are needed to make dvd2mp3 work. This program is itself fairly simple and it leaves most of the difficult work to other programs. I don't know of any need to have any specific versions of these programs. If you find any issues of this sort, please let me know.
Since dvd2mp3 is written in perl, the most important dependency is perl itself. Two non-standard perl libraries are required as well, MP3::Tag and Term::ReadLine. These are available from CPAN <http://cpan.org>, as well as many distributions.
The extraction of audio for this program is done by mencoder/mplayer, so mplayer http://www.mplayerhq.hu/>; is also required. The audio is converted into mp3s by lame <http://lame.sourceforge.net/>. Another program, lsdvd <http://untrepid.com/acidrip/lsdvd.html>, is used by dvd2mp3 to get determine the structure of the dvd that is being ripped from.
I use Debian GNU/Linux. The following is a list of the Debian packages that you will need to use this program.
mplayer-386/mplayer-586/mplayer-k6
mencoder-586/mencoder-k6
lame
lsdvd
libmp3-tag-perl
libterm-readline-gnu-perl
Installation
Once you have all of the dependency for this program installed, installing it is a snap. Simply make sure that the file "dvd2mp3" is executable, and then move it to somewhere in your path.
Usage Hints
Running dvd2mp3 is simple. There are several command line options (which you can view by typing "dvd2mp3 --help" from a command prompt), but most likely you will just want to run it by typing "dvd2mp3" from a command prompt.
Since I don't know of a good source for meta data for DVDs, you will have to enter the data manually. To avoid having to type in song names for all of the tracks on a DVD, I suggest that you search the web for your DVD until you find a site that has tack listing for the DVD. Then copy and paste the track listings. Then cleanup the track listings and copy and paste this info into the terminal window you are running dvd2mp3 in.
This procedure is not ideal, but I haven't been able to find a source that has consistent track listings for DVDs. Feel free to let me know if you have any suggestions on this issue as well.
Licenses
This program is released under the GNU General Public License (version 2 or later at your choice) as well as the Artistic License. Copies of these licenses are included with the program files.
Comments
Send comments, suggestions, or patches to the sourceforge site <http://sourceforge.net/projects/dvd2mp3/> or directly to me.
Jim Crumley <jcrumley at gmail.com>