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In your oggenc settings, is there a reason you resample? You said you were picky about quality, yet you're dropping the sample rate.

I forgot to answer this one. No reason, other than I was playing around with the settings, vaguely remembered something about resampling in some manual, and set that option. I can think of a reason to resample, but that would apply at an earlier stage, when ripping the files to WAV, if I ever want to put those WAVs on CD. In my own latest attempts, I've dropped the resample option.

LSDVD refuses to build with a libdvdread-related error in make:

checking for dvdread/ifo_read.h... no
configure: error: Header files for dvdread not found

This is a bit of a bummer, because the first DVD I tried your script on had an insane title/chapter structure that left me with no option but to guess what was where. Right now, it seems that all the chapters of the first concert are in movie title 3, except the first song/chapter, which I haven't found yet. There's another concert on the disk that I hope is on title 4, but as there are 7 titles I might be looking for it for a while.
Thanks for the script, though. I'll try it again on another disk soon.

Hee, we posted within a minute of one another. So you posted just as I had a whole batch of new questions
I don't think /dev/dvd symlinks to my external driver... it returns errors when I use it. Probly just a matter of how SuSE handles USB drives; it doesn't know what /dev/sr0 is supposed to be until that device actually reports that something has been loaded in it. But I'll add the config option next time I'm on the home machine (I went back to my studio almost immediately after posting my previous message).

Yeah. I figured out the -chapters option myself; now all I need to do is figure out how to make good use of them. lsdvd should handle, but sourceforge refused to let me have it earlier this evening.

I'm learning a lot of stuff here, but it's like putting together a jigsaw puzzle. What I want should be possible, but I haven't got all the pieces I need.

Mplayer's man pages are as unwieldy as the application itself; the man page format isn't up to presenting that much info. Bleagh.

Right. Figured these things out. To encode a chapter from a DVD, I have to add "-chapter x-x" with x being the chapter number to the mplayer command line Xepher suggested. You have to add it twice because otherwise Mplayer will encode from the start of the chapter to the end of the DVD.  Also, you may need to figure out which track on the tracklist is which chapter on the DVD by trial and error
Currently I manually rename each audiodump, move it to a directory that serves as a sandbox, and use

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for s in *.wav;do oggenc --resample 44100 --quality 6 $s;donethe basic syntax of which I snagged from a webpage with similar instructions for PNGout.. Those instructions needed some tweaking before they worked with the PNGout installation on my machine, by the way.
I'd like to be able to use a similar loop for mplayer... If I can read out the list of chapters on a DVD (something like 'for s in /dev/sr0/*.vob" except that the number of *.vob files doesn't correspond to the number of chapters, and I can only access them as /media/DVDtitle anyway)
and tell MPlayer to output filenames based on a variable, then the hassle of ripping songs will be dramatically reduced. This is the sort of thing GUI front ends do well, but so far all the front ends I've tried either refused to download, refused to build or crashed the moment the DVD was accessed.
So, how do I tell it to separate out the chapters? Once that's dealt with, I'm good.

I think Lame may actually be missing on my system (at least, when I tried to use mencoder, it reported Lame as being missing, but that doesn't mean it's not actually there), but that at least is easy to fix (SuSE tends to play the legal aspects very safe, so even an interpreted source library like lame is treated as patent-breaking executable code).

Mplayer, on my system, is a curate's egg. It kind of, sort of works, but DVD playback with sound is still broken. That is, when I use it with the GUI and for playback through the audio drivers. But Mencoder, which is part of the Mplayer codebase, knows where to find the sound, so until I discover that this is a problem, I'm going to pretend it's not:)

Two comments for the benefit of anyone stumbling upon this thread in six months time: I will need some more options for this. Specifically, I'll need to set the -dvd-device /dev/sr0 , because otherwise it'll look for /dev/dvd. And I will probably want to be able to set a higher bitrate than the default, because I'm a bit anal about that. I'll figure that out myself though.

I have one mixed-session DVD Audio disc that I may want to try to extract or indeed play. Since buying it, I haven't found a single DVD player that could find the Audio content; they all default to showing the 10 minutes of video and don't offer any options to switch to audio ("pure" DVD Audio disks at least run on my cheapo DVD player). But that's not urgent, because I have the same audio content on CD anyway.

Hmmmm... I think on most concert DVDs, individual tracks are "scenes" within the main movie. Is there a way to separate them out on that mplayer command line? Even then, getting an entire DVD ripped will require some work, but I think I can figure out how to write a batch script for that myself.

*thinks that in addition to getting some of his favourite music out there, he's also building up some marketable skills with this*

Thanks!

So... I got my PC fixed up, and treated myself to an external DVD writer. Should be useful for archiving, plus I can watch DVDs on it. Except of course that my PC is a linux system, and DVD playback isn't always straightforward on one of those. With a bit of snagging packages from unofficial SuSE sites, a bit of googling and a bit of compiling from source, I managed to get things to the point where Kaffeine could play Region 2 DVDs. Good, pats on the back for me.
But then, of course, I had to look at my concert DVDs, and think "wouldn't it be nifty if I could get the audio from that and convert it to MP3 or Ogg or something that I could play along with my regular music collection?" And that turned out to be an even bigger can of worms. I was again thrown into Dependency Hell, with just about any of the most-used tools refusing to run or compile on my system, despite me being sure, at least in some cases, that the libraries they needed were in fact present on my system. But if you get one package from Packman, one from the official SuSE discs, and another from source code, things get a bit messy.
Another problem was that programs that did run, such as Mencode, come with some seriously involved command line options (and one program that might serve as a front end came with some nasty disclaimers about its code quality and introduced two fresh dependencies). Mencode requires about five command line options just to extract a single file, and the documentation is less than helpful. It wouldn't be a problem if among the examples there'd be at least some based on someone wanting to extract just the audio. As it is, I have no idea how to do that.

In short, is there an easy way to 1) extract audio from DVDs without also filling my hard drive with video files; 2) on a SuSE linux system; 3) without going nuts from learning hundreds of cryptic command line options, and 4) without spending days in Dependency Hell?

I am aware that if you want to work with multimedia on linux, a good way to start is not to do it on a SuSE system, but it's the one I've got installed, it's the one that I understand slightly better than other distributions, and while I'm willing to put in some effort for this (and have, oh, boy, I have), switching just for this is more trouble than it's worth.

But you Xepherites have been so helpful with my PC troubles (thanks again for that!), maybe you know the answer to this one as well!

.... but I LIKE border collies!

Hogan's a bit busy to go around hating anybody now.

Good point. I do have a drive cable to spare, so I'll look into that. Thanks.

Some things you should know. Not as a specific answer to your question, but as a general primer to the world of publishing - most of these links are related to comics, but there are some relating to writing in general.

Hmmm... so a shortcut would be getting a router? Me like that idea...

Well I'll be! I hadn't heard about the murder charge. From a little bit of googling, it does look like SuSE/Novell will stop shipping their linux distro with reiserfs as its default file system.

Anyway, I just did the final check on the new drive, loading it again in Kubuntu to see if it showed files correctly now in a system that didn't play as nicely with reiser. Looks like it, and I can now proceed to testing the next drive.

While we're talking about linux: is it normal for some distros to have difficulties working with cable modems? Both Kubuntu and Knoppix refuse to get online when I use them at home, while working perfectly well with the ADSL at my studio. Or is this problem restricted to LiveCD technology, which can't include as many drivers and such as a full distribution? I wouldn't mind switching fully to Ubuntu or Debian (especially if reiserfs is going to fall by the wayside anyway, so any problems Ubuntu might have with it aren't all that relevant) but I do need to be able to get the home PC online.

Mind you, it might just as easily be my home cable modem provider. They're not cooperating well with my iBook either.

Success! Knoppix recognised my file system and found all my files in good working order. I'm copying some of my art over to the optical drive as I speak.
(I may end up having to do that again as a result of giving the wrong auto-skip instruction, but at least I can verify that the data is present on the drive and in correct working order.)

Well....

I found a backup of my financial stuff from before the last time I destroyed a file system (that case was deliberate - I wanted a fresh start with SuSE 10), so apart from a spreadsheet of my profit and loss which I made between then and the start of my current troubles, my records are complete.

I've been thinking about the PDF behaviour. The thing about the PDFs is that I didn't do anything to them after copying them to the current drive. The OpenOffice files of the same documents were opened at some stage or another, whether it was simply to look at them or to use them as templates for new invoices. So these were probably touched by the filesystem journal, whereas the PDFs were not. IDE controller breaks, multiple forced reboots, journal kaput, files inaccessible. Almost makes sense even to me.

Also, what with it being reiserfs.... reiser served me well for years. I never touched the default kernels from SuSE, which works well with reiser. But perhaps (K)Ubuntu doesn't? I remembered the other day that Kubuntu hadn't actually been my preferred emergency system - I'd just been using it because it's prettier than Knoppix. But Knoppix is better about automagically mounting drives and may well be nicer to reiser. So I'll try that one today.

I've finally found the time and the energy to try out part of Xepher's suggestions. Today, I bought a IDE-to-USB drive housing thingy, figured out how to remove one of the hard drives from the broken machine, figured out which part of the seemingly simple instructions for assembling the IDE-to-USB housing thingy were wrong and which were impossible to carry out due to shoddy workmanship on the casing, brought the whole shebang to the studio, loaded Kubuntu there and got the drive to work. Yay me! The bad news is that I ended up having some of the same problems that I had with both drives at home: some of the files I knew were there when the computer broke weren't to be found on the  drive, and some of the others seemed to exist, but when I copied them, Konqueror refused to do so. With these, all  I get from copying the files is 0-byte files on the target drive, even though Konqueror lists these files as available and having a believable file size on the source drive. Weeeeird. Opening these files in, say, OpenOffice (I am mainly concerned at this time with my financial accounts as doing my bookkeeping is enough of a pain without having to reconstruct my old invoices. Anything else including music files and even my backed up art images is of secondary importance - that stuff exists on CDs or can be remade easily), I get an error saying the file is corrupt, can't be repaired, sorry, can't open it at all. Strangely, some PDF files I made of several of my outgoing invoices did still work, and these have now been copied on my portable drive, leaving me with only three invoices to reconstruct or otherwise recover. So it's not all bad.

I'm going to do the same with the other hard drive. That one's harder to reach inside the PC's case, but it may have more functional data left on it, including those missing bills and an old copy of my email folder.