My Raspberry Pi media centre project - Part II

23/07/2013 - ordering

Ordered everything:

• Raspberry Pi + power supply from RS Components. This takes a whopping 28 business days to arrive, but I'm busy enough ripping everything
• HDD + DVD Drive from megabuy.com.au, my favorite reseller with PCCasegear.

29/07 - installation of the ripping station
Received the stuff from Megabuy.

Installed the DVD Drive (too easy). I need a region-free drive since half my DVDs are Region 2. It appears this drive (LG GH24NS90) uses a MediaTek chipset for which no RPC1 firmware exists. In short for those who don't patch their DVD firmware, a RPC1 firmware is an unofficial/hacked firmware upgrade that makes your DVD drive region-free. More information on RPC1.org, it's worth browsing.

I thought I might have to buy a second drive, to keep one Region 4 and one Region 2, but this wasn't needed, you'll see why.

I rip DVDs in 2 stages (on Windows):

1. DVD Decrypter does a full rip and removes the DVD protection (hey, I bought those movies, I do what I want with them, no?). It creates an .ISO file.
2. Handbrake reads the ISO, locates where the main movie is, extracts it and creates a video file, either mp4 or h264. I prefer h264 since the Pi can decode this format in hardware.

The accidental beauty of this is (in full humility) that it takes about as much time to rip with DVD Decrypter than to encode with Handbrake (on a quad core Sandy Bridge i5), so I can encode a DVD while ripping the next at the same time

DVD Decrypter is a fairly low-level program, which completely bypasses the DVD Drive region limitation. I'm not sure how it does, it just says it does a brute force attack on the key, which is supposed to take longer but I couldn't see any difference.

07/08  ripping
OK, to this day I've now ripped more than 100 DVDs. I don't dare counting how many are remaining.

Doing about 6-7 per night, the routine is:

1. stack DVDs next to the PC
2. feed them to DVD Decrypter once in a while
3. if I'm not in front of the PC, just enqueue all ISOs in Handbrake before going to bed, and let the PC churn data at night.

The Pi will not arrive before a couple of weeks, so I must rip as much as possible. DVD Decrypter is so easy to use that the whole family helps. Isn't that beautiful?

Stay tuned for Part III, when the Raspberry arrives. I hope it arrives...