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20. MythDVD.

MythDVD is a part of the mythplugins package. See MythPlugins for instructions on downloading the tarball. 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.

20.1 Manual Compilation of Prerequisites

20.2 Pre-compiled binaries

Mandriva 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

In the example below, we have enabled support for transcoding and for VCD playing. You may remove these options if you don't need them. 

$ cd ~/mythplugins-0.20
$ ./configure --disable-all --enable-mythdvd --enable-transcode --enable-vcd
$ qmake mythplugins.pro
$ make
$ su
# make install

20.3 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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