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!