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18. MythDVD.

MythDVD is an application which rips DVDs and makes them available for use with MythVideo. You may also transcode the DVD content from MPEG-2 to other formats which should greatly reduce the amount of space the DVD material takes up on your hard drive.

MythDVD has a number of prerequisites to enable transcoding functionality. If you only wish to play DVDs rather than convert them to something like MPEG-4 or xvid you may skip the prerequisite installation step.

18.1 Manual Compilation of Prerequisites

18.2 Pre-compiled binaries

Mandrake users may install the prerequisites this way:

# urpmi libdvdread3 libdvdread3-devel a52dec liba52dec-devel 
# urpmi mplayer ogle xine
Assuming that you've added a PLF mirror, you may also load the rest of the prerequisites using the following command:
# urpmi xvid xvid-devel fame libfame0.9-devel transcode libdvdcss

Next comes the configuration and compilation. If you don't want to transcode, then the first command in the next example can simply be ./configure

$ ./configure --enable-transcode
$ qmake mythdvd.pro
$ make
$ su
# make install

18.3 Running the Myth Transcoding Daemon

Transcoding ("ripping") a DVD requires you to run the Myth Transcoding Daemon (mtd). To ensure that mtd is configured correctly, you should first test it at the command line.

$ mtd -n
The last line of text should show something like:
mtd is listening on port 2342
This indicates that mtd is ready for use. Once you've successfully tested mtd in the foreground, type CTRL-C to stop mtd. You may then start it as a background (daemon) process.
$ mtd -d

Running mtd as a daemon will allow you to automatically start it during the boot process. For example, you may add mtd -d to your rc.local file, or you can adjust the script/steps outlined in the section called Automatically starting mythbackend at system boot time to start mtd instead of mythbackend.


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