Pages

Monday, July 1, 2013

List DVD content

If you need to know what is on your DVD then you can use mplayer. With the right option mplayer lists the content of any DVD. This is very useful if you need to copy your DVD's to harddisk etc. (especially for TV series on DVD). Just run the following mplayer command to list the DVD content (output truncated - very): 

$ mplayer dvd://2 -identify -frames 0
MPlayer 1.1-4.7.1 (C) 2000-2012 MPlayer Team

Playing dvd://2.
...
ID_DVD_TITLES=2
ID_DVD_TITLE_1_CHAPTERS=1
ID_DVD_TITLE_1_ANGLES=1
ID_DVD_TITLE_2_CHAPTERS=21
ID_DVD_TITLE_2_ANGLES=1
ID_DVD_TITLE_1_LENGTH=24.700
ID_DVD_TITLE_2_LENGTH=3290.500
...


The -identify option will list more information about a played file like audio and video quality etc (you can use the -identify option with any avi,mp4 etc file). The second option -frames 0 will force mplayer to play zero frames so you get no audio or video output and mplayer will only show the information about the file itself.
To understand the above output you need to know that a DVD may consists of several titles and each title may contain several chapter. Eg. the first title contain a chapter about the studio and another chapter about DVD manufactor. The second title could contain four chapters. Each a different episode of a tv series. If run a command like the following:

$ mplayer dvd://2
...


Then all chapter of the second title of the DVD would be played. That means all episodes. Probably you want only watch one episode then use the -chapter option. If you want to watch the third episode (the third chapter of the second dvd title) then run the following command:

$ mplayer dvd://2 -chapter 3-3
...


No comments:

Post a Comment