waider

https://www.waider.ie/hacks/diary/2025/october.html#05

Having fought my way past some combination of DVD weirdness to deal with either a bad disc or some funky copy protection, and fixed the stupid writing-to-db bug (I'd cleverly included some writing code in an if statement that was excluding it from executing, which was a form of caching, which my long-ago colleague Brian taught me always to be wary of...) I am now encountering another DVD rip with issues. This one definitely looks like I may have to poke around in mplayer to see how mplayer handles it and why ffmpeg can't do the same.

IMDb seems to have broken the "reference view" (movie url/reference) which I had set as a preference and as a default landing link from this page. The "fullcredits" page is a poor substitute but will do for now. And thanks to some previous scripting work updating my entire 25-year-old nerd diary took seconds.

https://www.waider.ie/hacks/diary/2025/october.html#05

https://www.waider.ie/hacks/diary/2025/october.html#03

Very curious. For some reason my attempts to write data back to a SQLite database are not working, but are also not producing errors.

This is part of the DVD ripping stuff. Yes. A database.

https://www.waider.ie/hacks/diary/2025/october.html#03

https://www.waider.ie/hacks/diary/2025/october.html#01

Jiggled the DVD ripping thing to find the title with the most chapters. It worked. Except that picked up a making-of/extra that had more chapters than the movie on the same disc. Trying now with "longest title" but I can already see that's going to hit a number of identical-length titles and I'm not sure which is the one I want.

https://www.waider.ie/hacks/diary/2025/october.html#01

https://www.waider.ie/hacks/diary/2025/september.html#29

The title/titleset confusion has me wondering if I've done a whole lot of ripping of the wrong thing, but it seems not as best I can tell. I did wedge in something to find the longest title on a disc at some point, and maybe that's worked out well for me.

https://www.waider.ie/hacks/diary/2025/september.html#29

https://www.waider.ie/hacks/diary/2025/september.html#27

Decided I've had enough of The Journal and dropped it from the RSS feeds. Sam from Dublin Inquirer wrote a great editorial piece a few years back about how you can report on things like facists and racists without actually giving them a platform, and The Journal fails miserably at that, being quite happy to provide ample column inches (so to speak) for such bigots to explain their "legitimate concerns" and other such bollocks. Pro tip: it does not show them in a ridiculous light. It does not do anything good in "the marketplace of ideas". You wiil not encourage a debate that will see these people get any sort of pushback on their fearmongering and scaremongering and general disregard for other humans. That aside, The Journal also tends towards clickbait headlines. So, off the feeds you go.

Met up with some colleagues for a bit of an Old Fart drinking session. We had 80+ years combined tenure at the table...

https://www.waider.ie/hacks/diary/2025/september.html#27

https://www.waider.ie/hacks/diary/2025/september.html#25

Ran the mplayer rip in debug mode, now going to see if I can get something similar out of tccat or ffmpeg. I might also see about updating libdvdnav/libdvdread as it looks like there may have been some recentish changes in these?

Hmm. Most of the recent changes seem to revolve around DVD Audio and changing the build system to some new tool.

https://www.waider.ie/hacks/diary/2025/september.html#25

https://www.waider.ie/hacks/diary/2025/september.html#23

OK. looks like I may definitely have a corrupted disc in my collection. The Rock, if you must know. I'll try it in an actual DVD (actually Bluray) player and see what it does; I figure if it's playable, there's gotta be a way for me to rip the bits.

(annoyingly, promotional material on the disc seems to be fine - it's the main feature that's inaccessible.)

https://www.waider.ie/hacks/diary/2025/september.html#23

https://www.waider.ie/hacks/diary/2025/september.html#21

My work anniversary led to me reading through some old entries in this diary. Ah, nostalgia.

DVD Ripping! Currently the script is churning through what I've already ripped trying to verify if the result is plausible, e.g. if it's a movie, is it longer than about 20 minutes? This is taking a while because getting the actual length of an MPEG2 file, as opposed to what the header says is the length, while pulling the file over a wireless link from an AFP share, is not a speedy process.

https://www.waider.ie/hacks/diary/2025/september.html#21