I’ve got some travelling coming up, and I thought it would be nice to pass the time by playing a DVD or two on my Eee PC. My USB DVD writer is larger and heavier than the Eee, and requires mains power so this would mean copying the DVDs onto a 2Gb USB memory stick I have spare.

After several hours Googling I was starting to despair. I’d describe myself as a reluctant hacker – yes, I have been known to ./configure, make, make install, if that really is the only way to install software, and I’ve even compiled the odd kernel in earlier days. But from the articles I’d found, ripping a DVD onto a memory stick in Linux required super-human knowledge of video and audio formats and a thousand other things besides. Life’s too short – why isn’t there Linux software which just works ™?

Then I found thoggen.

Insert DVD in the drive and start thoggen.

thoggen finds the DVD drive and reads the DVD. Check that thoggen has selected the main movie and press OK:

Select the size of the screen and where you want to save the files and press OK:

The movie starts to play. This is where you need to be very patient: Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid eventually took 11 hours 35 minutes; Shrek took 12 hours 12 minutes; and Silence of the Lambs 14 hours 28 minutes. However, at the end you get a .ogg file which “just plays” on the Eee.

A Linux program which just works ™. Bliss.

This entry was posted on Saturday, August 30th, 2008 at 8:14 pm and is filed under Open-source. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.