Idea for a plugin developer out there.

[lumpy]

I am trying to get up to speed on making plugins but I cant horde my idea until I get up to speed, it's jsut a great idea that needs to be done.

The DVD ripper plugin is great but it is a hard drive space waster, fine if you have a terabyte on your gbPVR box, not fine if you don't like iso's or VOB's...

What's a avi or mp4 guy to do? The program Handbrake has a cli interface for Windows that could make a dvdripper plugin rip to a single AVI/MP4 file easily. It would not work for tv episode disks but it will work for most movie DVD's and if the plugin called a specific batch file it could be tweaked by the user easily for a favored bitrate. All the user needs is a text field to type in the name of the movie before clicking on the rip button, if you did it right you can run it at a low priority and the rip would not interfere with normal operation at all.

Just an idea. probably could be done in a short time by modifying the existing dvdripper plugin by someone that was up to speed and had a working dev environment all set up.

For example, I have a single click rip for all my DVD's on my PC like the following...

handbrakecli -i "D:\VIDEO_TS" -o "C:\movies\mymovie2.mp4" -e x264 -E lame -b 2500 -2 -T --detelecine -x ref=2:bframes=2ubme=5:me=umh -B 160 -R 48 -v

the above does an auto-crop to get rid of black bars, 160bitrate mp3 audio (It can do ac3 passthrough as well) and detelecines the movie. this works great for 90% of the movies out there. it fails on Tv documentaries or shows that are not telecined but interlaced. (second button to run a second script for interlaced?)

[McBainUK]

Someone else would have to help with the details but can't the handbrake command line interface be used by the Video Library's transcode feature?

I'm sure I remember reading on the forum about adding a custom transcoder...maybe worth a search?

[lumpy]

probably, but I did not think that would point at a DVD in the DVD drive and work from there. does the video transcode happily work on a DVD directly?

[McBainUK]

Hmm, good point. I forgot the file wasn't there to start with

[K.S.]

if it's just a simple cli, why don't you do it with autoit script (runs in the background with no active window) & custom task? name the custom task "Rip DVD to MP4" & you could even get the output to i.e. the videos dir & named after the DVD label ;-)

try the following au3, whipped up in no time , if it's working you could add some spice (error handling, display screenpopup when done etc...) for more comfort...
at the moment it's running your task & name the output like the disc label. if there is no disk label it will name the output as "DVDRip YYYY.MM.DD HH-MM-SS.mp4" with the current date&time.

have fun

Code:

$Drive = "D:"
$outputdir = "C:\movies\"

;check volume label. If label is empty then generate label
$vollbl = DriveGetLabel($Drive)
If $vollbl = "" Then
    $vollbl = "DVDRip " & @YEAR & "." & @MON & "." & @MDAY & " " & @HOUR & "-" & @MIN & "-" & @SEC & ".mp4"
EndIf

Run ( 'handbrakecli -i "' & $Drive & '\VIDEO_TS" -o "' & $outputdir & $vollbl & '" -e x264 -E lame -b 2500 -2 -T --detelecine -x ref=2:bframes=2:subme=5:me=umh -B 160 -R 48 -v"')