Motivation For Creating Baserip

It’s Christmas day 2013 and I’m up early. That’s no surprise; my ten year old daughter is desperate to unwrap her presents and she sits in front of me in the middle of a pile of promising wrappers, the only thing on her mind is which to open first.

At once she starts to look avidly through the small mountain, now where is it? Aha, here it is! This is the one, somehow she detects the exotic nature of the paper, its very foreigness. “This is the one” she gleefully pronouces and she’s correct. In the way that only children can, she has recognised the package from her uncle who lives far away from these shores.

The paper surrounding the selected present yields as quickly as the snow melting outside the house. Inside she pulls out the long-awaited package, her excitiment seeming to spark in her young eyes.

You see, my daughter is a huge fan of Harry Potter; she’s read all the books, many more than once, she’s seen all the movies, well all except the one she’s holding in her hands. This is the last film of the series, the one she’s been waiting for for so many months.

“Can we watch it Daddy!”, I have to temper her excitment, “Later” I say with a smile and I know that I’ll have to stick to my word.

And I do.

It is later and we put the DVD in the player and ... nothing. A quick investigation reveals the problem: the DVD is “region 1” and we live in “region 2”. My anger rises, this is a legally bought DVD, inserted into a legally bought DVD player connected to a legally bought television. Why is my daughter not allowed to watch the film? The thought that my daughter has been denied this simple pleasure, not by any fault but by design angers me even more and I resolve to do something about it.

I have a network enabled TV and I have a DLNA server so I decided to rip the movie and put it on the server. After all this is the only way my daughter is going to watch the film this Christmas.

But how to rip?

• A couple of years ago transcode was my weapon of choice but that is long since out of maintenance and the last time I tried it, it didn’t work as it should.
• DVD::Rip is a front-end for transcode so no luck there either.
• I use Arista to transcode short movies taken from my (stills) camera so I try this. It chokes, coming to a halt after the first pass.
• Acidrip is the closest I’ve found to a simple front end for mencoder but it doesn’t support x264 very well. I take a look for an up-to-date version and discover that it too is out of maintenance.

So I give up looking and use mencoder from the command line. It’s been years since I did this. It’s fun but time-consuming wading through all the options.

So I decide to write my own and base it on Acidrip.