Thursday, December 28, 2017

Audio/Video Tools - ripping SACD, DVD-Audio and Blu-ray


So you're running Kodi and want to have all your SACD and DVD-Audio music online?

DVD Audio Extractor is the tool for the job, it'll pull the audio out of DVDA discs and save as MLP or convert to FLAC, it'll even pull tags for most discs.  Works with any DVD drive.  Use the GUI or there's a command line tool dvdae.



My LA Woman DVD-Audio


SACD is a harder one to deal with.  The discs won't read in regular DVD drives, so you need to either get the one special PS3 that will run Linux and read SACDs, or recent news says it can be done by connecting to a port on the newer Oppo players (model Oppo 105D is reported to work).  Otherwise, go fish on bittorrent for the ISOs.

Once you have the SACD ISO files, sacd_extract will turn them into .dsf files that Kodi will play.
Look about for sacd_extract-0.3.8-1.144.x86_64.rpm or source, I started off building from source but found a SUSE Linux RPM that works fine on Fedora.  Example command line:

sacd_extract -m -s -i BatOutOfHell.iso

And chmod a+x on the directory it creates, otherwise my Kodi players with NFS access can't play the files!  On some recent conversions to .dsf (the -s option) I've been getting a loud POP at the end of each song, so I switched to using the -p flag (Philips .dff format) instead of the -s and the problem has gone away.  I don't know if it's a problem with the disc, Kodi or sacd_extract but I've not had it happen before.

My Bat Out Of Hell SACD

Blu-Ray - to move your discs online the best tool I've used is makemkv, it'll open any type of DVD or Blu-Ray disc and extract the content unchanged to .mkv files.  That right, it doesn't "reencode" or compress anything.  If you want to compress or convert to another format, use a tool for that, Handbrake or just ffmpeg.  There's a lot of bugs and problems with Handbrake, I'd not use it for extracting.  Example command line:

ffmpeg -i mpeg2movie.mkv -c:v libx264 -crf 17 mpeg4movie.mkv





If you get an error like below, it means your blu-ray drive doesn't understand the new key/disc that just came out and has therefore bricked itself.  That's right, it won't even read the old discs it use to.
The only fix I know of it to upgrade to a newer release of makemkv, which somehow "unbricks" the blu-ray drive and your problem is solved.

"Tip for everyone, MakeMKV displays the AACS version of the disc before you open the disc. Don't try to open the disc if the disc is higher than the current version that is supported by MakeMKV, which is v63."

Can't read AACS VID from disc - most likely current AACS host certificate is revoked by your drive

See MKB for the story.