I promoted the same idea for a while (there was a post a year ago), but there was always an element of a white lie to it. My efforts were not systematic, and result was not very satisfactory. Evirus jumps into the pool completely.

I am through with optical media. Well, not exactly. However, I am ripping all my DVDs and CDs to hard drives. I’m not even taking the time to re-encode them or cut unwanted language tracks; I’m copying exact ISOs. The reason is because while storage space for optical media continues to improve, reductions to spin-up and seek times remain marginal at best. You’re crazy if you think I want to manually load discs and then wait for the optical drive to reach a playable state.

Now I really wish he provided more specifics. My primary tool is mplayer -dumpstream, which has the unpleasant side effect of losing the index. So, there are no chapter breaks and the tracks are not labeled anymore: instead of "Japanese" and "English", they are "Audio 1" and "Audio 2". In order to preserve chapters, I have to rip by chapter. So, the end result is more like:

mplayer -dvd-device /dev/scd0 -dumpstream -dumpfile $tempvob -chapter "$chapter" dvd://$titleno

Search for title ahd chapter is not automated, and has to be done with VLC. This is the most tedious and annoying part of the process.

Until now, I catenated chapter VOBs back into episodes, because I do not know the VLC playlist format, which presumably would allow to auto-load complete episodes. So, the little omakes that Kiminozo packs into the stream ended stuck together with episodes and cannot be separated without video editing software.

In any case, Evirus is quite right about the spin-up time, or perhaps my software is just retarded, but the problem have already created bad habits in me. My DVD spins down very quickly if I pause to find a good screenshot for blogging. The search itself is not an issue, the stream is cached. But afterwards, the playback will skip once it hit the uncached spot. The readahead is not big enough to overcome full seconds of spin-up. So, I found myself resuming and quickly pausing again, that allows the drive to start, then resuming again. This is a tantamount to turning with a bootful of rudder on LongEZ. When Burt was asked why it was designed this way, he just shrugged. He never thought it a problem.

I had the idea to construct a DVD TiVO years ago, but it wasn’t cost effective at the time. I’m still doing this manually, but I know others have had the same idea and writen various scripts to automate much of the procedure. I don’t know if anyone has created a fully-automated file server/media center to do this yet, but he’s surely a thousandaire for his efforts.

The key is to interpret the DVD script, I think. I would pay for a commercial product doing it, but I don't know how much... I guess if center flakes on my precious Azumanga DVD, my willingness to shell money will grow quite a bit.

UPDATE: Christopher shows me how to do it. Indeed, why bother with parsing when you can just dump the whole ISO. Also, solution to the box problem!