gabriel rosenkoetter <gr@eclipsed.net> writes:

> pkgsrc/graphics/dvdview exists, but it's a bit less than ideal. It
> doesn't play audio itself. Instead, if you supply the -A flag, it
> will spit the audio out on stdout, so you can then do something
> like:
> 
>   dvdview -A some.mpeg | mpg123 -
> 
> The down side is that there's no way to sync the audio, and it's
> almost always out of sync. I don't know how or if this deals with
> reading off an actual DVD (or grokking region encoding, etcetera). I
> would guess that you'd still have to use something like DeCSS to get
> the mpeg2 file off the DVD.

dvdview works okay to read VOB movie files directly off of non-CSS
encrypted DVDs (in my case, a "system test and tuning" DVD that puts
the video and audio systems through their paces and has test tones,
speaker phase adjustments, and so on). A surprisingly large number of
discs put out by non-major studios aren't CSS encrypted.

You then run into the legal snag that the audio is often in AC3
format, and we just had a little flap with ac3dec....

        - Nathan