I said it before and I will say it again – dvdrip is by far the best graphical user interface for ripping and encoding DVDs on Linux.
dvdrip provides a user with simple, but powerful means of controlling a whole bunch of command line utitilies that have a gadzillion options each. Instead of scrolling through the manuals and Googling for examples, one could just click around with the mouse and use many sensible defaults.
I’ve been using dvdrip for a few years now and I never had a problem. That is until I tried to run it on Fedora Linux 4. I have to say that I installed dvdrip with all the requirements using yum. I guess most of the software came from FreshRPMS.net, but I am not very sure.
Anyway, when I tried dvdrip on Fedora Linux 4 I ran into problem. It was ripping DVDs just fine, but it didn’t want to encode them. I was getting all sorts of errors mentioning absense of codecs that I knew I had and segmentation faults that are always not so easy to explain.
With a few Google queries I found out that the problem wasn’t in the dvdrip itself. It was in the transcode utility. You see, yum installs transcode-1.0.0 for Fedora Linux 4. This version of transocde is not very stable yet. The solution to the problem is to downgrade to transcode-0.6.14, which comes packaged for Fedora Core 3. As soon as the old transcode is in place everything works smoothly as always.