How to Rip DVD audio to mp3 or ogg

For some reason a couple DVDs (Springsteen concert videos) would just come out with static when I tried the -y raw option but work with WAV output. 1 DVD worked (U2 concert video) as MP3.

I gave up trying to figure out why and instead just used lame to convert my WAV to an MP3

for((x=1; x<=8; x++)) do transcode -i /dev/dvd -x dvd -T 1,$x,1 -a 0 -y wav -m track$x.wav; lame -V2 track$x.wav track$x.mp3; rm track$x.wav; done;

Thanks Kirby, that script works perfectly! note: minor tweaks to # of chapters (the x<=8 for future reference) and the title (1st 1 in the 1,$x,1) and I'm golden!

This article has been very helpful, and thanks in particular for Ascentury to his pointers on how to fix the “Bad address” error (summary: replace the “-x dvd” by “-x dvd,dvd” and the “-y $CODEC” to “-y null,$CODEC” in the above instructions, and there you go!

As this is the first page to come up on Google when searching for “rip dvd audio linux”, I want to share how I succeeded in extracting the 5.1 Audio from a music DVD directly to AC3 files. I could not find any other resources on how to do so without retranscoding or conversion to Stereo Audio.

I could not get direct AC3 extraction to work using transcode, as it would always fail with different errors depending on the “-y” values chosen. But from its output, I could derive how to do it. The following line will extract the multichannel AC3 audio from chapters 1-9 of track 4 of the DVD (“Systematic Chaos” 5.1 Mix DVD from Dream Theater) in the first optical drive in Arch Linux for files “Syschaos_{1..9].ac3”, which just play fine in VLC:

for i in {1..9} ; do tccat -T 4,${i},1 -i “/dev/sr0” -t dvd -d 0 | tcdemux -a 0 -x ac3 -S 0 -M 1 -d 0 | tcextract -t vob -x ac3 -a 0 -d 0 > Syschaos_${i}.ac3 ; done

The syntax of the tccat “-T” command is identical to transcode’s.

Again, thanks to the author and Ascentury for their valuable information! 🙂
Cheers from Germany,
Mike

After some more fiddling with it, I ran across some more issues which I overcame.

1) Another live DVD had both a Stereo and 5.1 mix. As the 5.1 was the second audio track, I had to change all the “-a 0” entries to “-a 1”.

2) I found about half of the files to be unplayable in both VLC and totem. ffmpeg could process them, giving some “incomplete block” and other other errors, but the output files where then okay. Turn out that just dropping the “tcextract” invocation fixed the problem as well. The resulting files are a few 100kb larger, but they all play fine in VLC and totem.

So finally I ended up using the following for the DVD Title 4, Chapters 1-9, Audio Track 0:
for i in {1..9} ; do tccat -T 4,${i},1 -i “/dev/sr0” -t dvd -d 0 | tcdemux -a 0 -x ac3 -S 0 -M 1 -d 0 > Syschaos_${i}.ac3 ; done

For another DVD (“Where Death is most alive” by “Dark Tranquillity”) I needed Title 1, Chapters 2-21, Audio Track *1*:
for i in {2..21} ; do tccat -T 1,${i},1 -i “/dev/sr0” -t dvd -d 0 | tcdemux -a 1 -x ac3 -S 0 -M 1 > Deathalive_${i}.ac3 ; done

3) As a side node, when creating MP3 files with transcode, one can alter the default of 128kbit/s using the -b switch, e.g. “-b 256k”.