Catch-up

So I didn’t get to make that entry last night. I had the option of pushing my sleepiness to the back and staying up late, or going to bed at 0200 so I could stay somewhat on schedule for the work I have to do next week. Clearly I chose the latter. Now I’ve got all this stuff to talk about and only about 13 minutes to spare right now. I’ll try and pack in what I can.

First, I got the “Donnie Darko” soundtrack last… god, I think Friday it was. The soundtrack has 18 tracks. the first 16 of these tracks are the score from the film, track 17 is the cover of “Mad World” by Gary Jules, and track 18 is an alternative version of that cover. Get this though: the entire CD is only 37m in length. Several of the songs aren’t any longer than what you hear in the movie (which is to be expected, I suppose, if not precisely what I did expect given my experience with past scores).

So I decided to make my own CD. I decided that, a la the “Pi” soundtrack, I would add in sound clips from the film. Now, I could just go from the DVD player audio outputs to the line-in on my sound card… but wait, DVD is digital already. Why can’t I just use that?

Not as easy as it sounds. I had it in my head that Sound Forge 5 would just magically open a ripped AC3 audio track, so I went about trying to do that. First I tried DVD::Rip which seemed to do what I wanted. It required transcode and a number of other packages; they were pretty trivial to make into RPMs in almost all cases, if they weren’t already available as RPMs. The only DVD-ROM in the house was actually in our Linux gateway, so I jammed the DVD in there and tried to use this software.

DVD::Rip had no obvious way to just rip AC3 audio from a song. More than that, I couldn’t really get it to work. Then I went to just calling transcode directly from the command line. First I realized I needed libdvdcss; or maybe that I had it in /usr/lib from one of the RPMs I had, but it needed to be called libdvdcss.so because transcode would load it dynamically.

At some point I actually got it to rip audio, but I got 16-bit, 44.1KHz (I think) PCM audio in a WAV file. Not what I was looking for (though I probably should have just taken it). I played with transcode; I tried running the transcode sub-programs with the command line it said it was using, but they never worked. It seemed to be decrypting the file, but had no way to just rip me foo.ac3 or something. If you haven’t figured this out by now, I had no idea what I was doing. Also, I had a hard time figuring out whether the drive should be mounted or not; when it was mounted, should I use the device (/dev/hdb) or the mount point (/mnt/cdrom) I think the mount point didn’t work, or at least not until I enabled the mount option that said to ignore case on filenames (so ls /mnt/cdrom/video_ts worked the same as ls /mnt/cdrom/VIDEO_TS) so something could find the VIDEO_TS directory. (It wanted it in uppercase, Linux was presenting it in lowercase.)

I went through a lot more trials and tribulations trying to get this to work before reading about some Windows utilities for ripping at doom9.net. They looked quite easy to use, and for once I was all for that. Problem: DVD drive is in gateway. Further, darky doesn’t want to shut gateway down. “We just need to hot swap the IDE DVD drive for my IDE CD-ROM drive!” says darky to euphorik. euphorik seems convinced that this won’t work at the very least, and probably will damage his hardware. I eventually convinced him and went to work.

Let me preface this by saying that I’ve “hot swapped” IDE CD-ROMs before. Or, at least, I know I’ve taken them out of a Linux machine without shutting it down. Linux just kind of assumes the drive is dead if it ever tries to hit it after it’s been removed. (Adding a CD-ROM in this fashion to a running Linux machine — or probably just about any x86 machine, I think — wouldn’t work AFAIK.) So I figured putting another similar (CD-ROM similar to old DVD-ROM… right? Ha) device in the place of the CD-ROM would be no big deal.

I open the machine and unplug power from the DVD: machine is fine, nothing in dmesg. Unplug IDE: still fine. Put in the new CD-ROM, connect IDE: still fine, nothing in dmesg. Plug in the power: reboot. Oops. I’ve had this happen before. I suspect I didn’t quite get the power in there right on the first try, there was a power spike or something, and the machine rebooted. I’ve seen this accompanied by a (harmless) spark on other machine. So that didn’t work. The gateway was fine, though, after it did some fsck’ing and came back up.

I shall continue the tale of DVD ripping from Windows, as well as other adventures, later. For now I have to shower in preparation for going to darkho’s house later.

(BTW, I’m making this entry from my Powerbook. Tee hee.)