Thoggen DVD Ripper

Yeah, I've got the patch somewhere and meant to apply it once the kate
elements made it into a gstreamer release (which is going to be any day
now).

It may be worth looking at kate (http://wiki.xiph.org/OggKate) as the
libkate sources include a patch for thoggen. Currently, it looks like vlc &
gstreamer (recently) support kate - it's unclear when other players will
support it.

> The DVDs are in form of subpictures/bitmaps. My question is: is
> there any accompany format (proprietary or opensource) that can
> be used to make ogg capable of subpicture/bitmap style subtitle?

Yes, there are multiple options:

(a) use OggMNG (http://wiki.xiph.org/index.php/OggMNG)
this is a spec that's not official or finished yet though

(b) use OggSpots (http://wiki.xiph.org/index.php/OggSpots)
also not official or finished yet (but looks more alive than
OggMNG)

(c) just use one of the above but with a custom stream
marker and let players deal with it.

Problem is that in any case it will take some time until players will
catch up and implement whatever we're going to use, since none of these
formats are used anywhere yet.

The DVDs are in form of subpictures/bitmaps. My question is: is there any
accompany format (proprietary or opensource) that can be used to make ogg
capable of subpicture/bitmap style subtitile?

For example, I often got files with .sub extension and put them into the
same folder as .avi, I got the subtitle in subpictures/bitmaps. This is
ugly (because .sub better be embeded in avi format) but it works. Users
prefer to see something ugly than being not able to see something
(subtitle). Is it possible thoggen also produce these .sub formats? I knew
thoggen is not supposed to be a feature-rich tool with a lot of editing
possibility but mostly purpose is to backup DVD, but subtitle is IMPORTANT
information on DVD that ought to be backed up, in this way or another.

If someone think it's only useful to watch moves in a foreign language: ->
the fact is MOST MOVIES I watch is in a foreign language (99% case,
English), and this is true for MOST Chinese people (I am Chinese), because
we watch hollywood, we watch european movies, we don't produce a lot of
good movies ourselves. This is also ture for almost all developing
countries (that makes up majority of the global population), because they
don't produce much, they consume western culture. So in this regard
subtitle is a vital feature for most users.

Here is a link to the Writ encoder / decoder:

https://trac.xiph.org/browser/trunk/py-ogg2

Here is a reference to converting subtitles from pictures to text and then
muxing the SRT files to OGM, using mencoder. I am not sure whether it is
possible to convert SRT to Writ though?

http://axljab.homelinux.org/Mencoder_DVD_to_OGM#Ripping_Subtitles

Hope this is helpful,

T.

> How developed is the Ogg Writ format? It seems to be used
> elsewhere and has a reference encoder. Is it possible to
> incorporate this into Thoggen?

The spec for Ogg Writ looks pretty much done, but it clearly says it's not
finished yet or endorsed by the Xiph foundation, so I don't really know
what the status is. I didn't know there was a reference encoder - is there?
Where is this format used? I've never seen it used anywhere or seen a file
with Writ content.

In any case, Writ isn't really too useful in the Thoggen context, because
it only deals with subtitle _text_. DVD subtitles, however, are on the DVD
in form of subpictures/bitmaps.

How developed is the Ogg Writ format? It seems to be used elsewhere and
has a reference encoder. Is it possible to incorporate this into Thoggen?