So, I’ve got a handful of Ubuntu machines. Â I also have a bigger handful of DVDs. Â I’d like to conver the DVDs to easier-to-store videos which can be accessed by MythTV, XBMC, my mobile devices, and whatever else easily. Â The best broadly-supported format to do that in is h264-encoded mp4 files. Â And DVD::Rip does a nice job of letting me use all 20 or so CPUs I have laying around, rather than limiting me to just one workstation.
Unfortunately, DVD::Rip uses transcode, which uses ffmpeg to do the encoding. Â And Ubuntu’s ffmpeg, for whatever reason, lacks h264 support. Â There’s a guid to rebuilding it which has you pull down the latest source for all the utilities from CVS, and make new packages which don’t work right and are a pain to maintain. Â I, on the other hand, want to just take the Ubuntu package and add one compile-time option, so it’ll still work like the vendor-provided package. Â After all, all I ned to do is build the exact same thing with the “–enable-libx264” option. Â Here’s how.
