how-i-play-video-on-linux

How I play video on Linux

– specifically, Debian

How to back up DVDs to a hard disk

% sudo apt-get install vobcopy libdvd-pkg

You may need to subsequently

sudo dpkg-reconfigure libdvd-pkg

Then the DVD device must be mounted, for example

sudo mount /dev/sr0 /mnt/<target>

even though you don’t actually need to mention the mount directory when you issue the backup command. To back up to the current directory issue:

vobcopy -m

How to get decent audio balance from surround sound DVDs

If you try to play a DVD with a 6-channel (“5.1”) surround sound audio track from a stereo speaker setup then the audio balance will likely be terrible. Symptoms include too quiet dialogue and speech and too loud music, sound effects and background noise.

I found it very hard to find a decent resolution to this problem, but ultimately the following works well for me. It may be possible to make it work even better by tweaking the parameters.

% mpv --deinterlace=yes \
      --alang=en \
      '-af=pan="stereo|FL=0.707*FC+0.3*FL+0.1*SL+0.1*LFE|FR=0.707*FC+0.3*FR+0.1*SR+0.1*LFE"' \
      --dvd-device=VIDEO_TS/ \
      dvd://<number>

Notes

To play the first track on the DVD choose <number> to be 0. To play subsequent tracks increment <number> accordingly.
VIDEO_TS is the top-level directory created by vobcopy.
For old recordings the dialogue may only play from the front centre (FC) channel. In that case you might want to omit FL, FR, SL and SR completely in the formula.
It seems important to play DVD files through --dvd-device ... dvd://<number> so the correct audio track for the correct language can be chosen by name (here en). The mapping between language names and audio track IDs seems to be stored in the .IFO file so if you play the .VOB files directly the mapping will not be used and you might find it hard to select the correct language.
In theory --audio-channels=stereo, with or without --ad-lavc-downmix=yes, should perform the down mixing, but it didn’t seem to make any difference for me.

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