I have been experimenting around with ripping some stuff recently, and ran into a few problems.

For most of the stuff, I have used acidrip to give me the command line entry needed to rip the disks with the settings I wanted, and changed a few small things [like the coding error additional colon in the command line when using the xvid codec, etc]. However, after ripping the disks, the results are not entirely what I had hoped for.

I specified a certain file size to maintain quality, ran a dual-pass at about 2200 kbps, audio with lame at 192. Once the files finished, I noted that they were all about 20-25% smaller than the file sizes I had set at the start. This was curious but not that dire.

The main problem was the aspect ratio. If you play the DVD straight, it shows at 854x480 or something close to that, but the file properties show it to be 720x480. If I play it in VLC, the aspect ratio is wrong [the correct one can be achieved by selecting the 16:9 ratio, but I would prefer this to be unneeded], and the sound is right. If I play it in Mplayer, the aspect ratio is correct, but the audio sync is off by about half of a second.

Any ideas on what I am doing wrong? Or is there just something I have overlooked? [Btw, if you tell me to read the manpages on mencoder, you can kiss my ass.]

Note: OS: Ubuntu 6.06 LTS

read the manpages
it realy helps

manpages are your there to help you
they are not that hard to read

Its 7216 lines, of almost entirely command switches.

so read it all

MPEG2 has embedded aspect ratio information (used by players to resize the 720x480 stream), which is lost when you transcode it to something else. Most non-MPEG2 codecs assume square pixels, so you need to resize and recrop to get the proper aspect ratio back.

EDIT: For instance, you have 720x480 source video (e.g., DVD video) that is assumed to have a 16:9 apsect ratio. Now, if you want to maintain full horizontal resolution (720 pixels), you need to to resize the video to 720x405 (720 * 9 / 16 = 405). However, most codecs prefer video dimensions to be a multiple of 4/8/16, so 720x404 would be a better choice. Alternatively, if you want to maintain vertical resolution, you need to resize to 853.3x480 (480 * 16 / 9 = 853.3333...). Applying the same multiple-of-four rule, we get 852x480.