DVD Solutions.

[theweaselking]

Everyone with any interest at all in such things already knows that the best available experience for watching TV and movies is also the cheapest, and the least legal. To the point where it's almost less annoying to take a season of TV on DVD, rip it, and play it on a TV connected to a media player than it is to swap the bloody DVDs.

However, disk space is still not unlimited, and so since I own the DVDs of Deadwood and had seen it, I deleted the computer copy.

Now I'm watching Deadwood again (because I felt like it) and *holy crap* it is UNBELIEVABLY annoying to have to swap disks, wait for menus, and be unable to simply queue up a season to play one after another.

Help me out, lazyweb: What are solutions for this, other than "download a pirated copy of Deadwood to go with my DVDs because the pirated version is better" or "swap disks and take hours ripping and encoding Deadwood"? Is there an easy way to make VLC Media player ignore the menus and go directlty to the .vob files, and enqueue those so at least I only have to swap disks every 2-3 episodes? Do people even *make* multi-disk DVD players any more, and if so is there a cheap one I can use for shit like this? And if so, it had BETTER be cheaper than a 2TB external disk to just store more AVIs on, I'm just saying.

Because right now, I'm swapping disks and dealing with the menus as an annoying-but-less-annoying-than-the-rip-process hazard of owning a legal copy of something. And that's just a pain in the ass.

Comments

[rbarclay.livejournal.com]

mplayer dvd://1 doesn't work because .. you use the w0rng OS?

[theweaselking.livejournal.com]

What does mplayer get me that VLC doesn't?

(The machine that is currently the immediate problem runs 7, but there's a Ubuntu machine with the same issue in the next room.)

[rbarclay.livejournal.com]

You can specify the title to play directly, and fuck everything else.

dvd://1
dvd://2
etc.

Or even dvd://2-5.

So, in essence, you look at the structure once, figure out your options (-fs -vm -zoom -alang=en dvd://2-5), and then go watch your content.

[theweaselking.livejournal.com]

Ah. It looks like VLC can do that - you just locate the .vob files directly, right-click, and enqueue. And that's a LITTLE annoying because you have to pick the episodes out from the features and the menus and whatever, but that's not hard - very few of the features are an hour long.