Apress - Smart Home Automation with Linux (2010)- P23:Linux users can now control their homes remotely! Are you a Linux user who has ever wanted to turn on the lights in your house, or open and close the curtains, while away on holiday? Want to be able to play the same music in every room, controlled from your laptop or mobile phone? Do you want to do these things without an expensive off-the-shelf kit | CHAPTER 3 MEDIA SYSTEMS Once you can use VLC to play DVDs you know the library is successfully installed and is consequently available to all the main media player applications such as mplayer totem xine and so on. When ripping DVDs you have to consider the amount of hard disk space you want to devote to your collection whether you want or need the DVD menus and on what devices they are being played. Ultimately there are two choices. Rip As ISO This makes a raw copy of the entire disc and stores it as a file. This is the easiest process to initiate because you simply invoke the following dd if dev dvd of bs 1024 This will generally require between 4GB and 8GB of space and includes all the DVD menus titles chapters and subtitles. Movie players like VLC will be able to handle interactive components such as menus but others won t. This is especially true of units that don t support the DVD logo since they won t have the CSS code and of smaller low-power devices such as MediaMVP. In the case of the latter you can partially solve the problem by using VLC to remotely transcode the movies but it still won t be able to handle the processing of the DVD menus. As will all disk images Linux is able to mount them to a directory so they can be read and so their files can be queried normally. This can be done with the following or automatically through the desktop mount -t udf -o loop dvdimage Note that you cannot mount the image to your usual DVD location such as dev dvd since that is a block device and you can only mount images to a directory. Rip As Movie Files This method occupies the bulk of DVD ripping software with many available versions for both the command line and the GUI. Although the GUI versions provide screenshots of the titles and chapters and an array of configurable options they are almost without exception merely front ends to a set of standard back-end tools such as mencoder. You can remove the resources and time .
