My DVD player is not working at the moment, so I want to watch a DVD on my VDR system in the living room.
In an earlier message on this list, somebody said that the DVD plugin is not working, so I did not waste any time trying. Also, my VDR PC does not have a DVD ROM anyway.
What I did, was:
1) I turned the DVD into a MPEG file using mplayer. Directly from a DVD ROM this can be done using mplayer -dumpstream dvd://1 If the DVD has already been ripped to an ISO image, this can be done using mplayer -dvd-device path_to.iso -dumpstream dvd://1
mplayer creates an MPEG file called "stream.dump".
2) I created a Video directory for the recording: mkdir -p /video/%Name_of_the_movie/2009-03-01.00.00.00.99.rec
3) I used genindex 0.1.3 to split the file into VDR recording files and to create the index: genindex -r -i stream.dump -d /video/%Name_of_the_movie/2009-03-01.00.00.00.99.rec -s 1024
At least for the one DVD I tries so far, this worked fine.
I also like the fact that I do not have to insert the DVD disk every time I want to watch the movie. It is nice to have it integrated seamlessly into my recordings.
I guess most of this could have been done with the mplayer plugin as well, but AFAIK the mplayer plugin does not allow me to choose audio tracks, it requires a high system load for re-encoding and it reduces the quality during re-encoding.
Just wanted to share my experience with the list.
Carsten.