Rip Discs

A few scripts to make ripping your media easier (for personal backup purposes). These are designed—similar to Don Melton’s scripts—to ultimately invoke HandBrakeCLI, with a smarter configuration. They in no way go into the depth that Don’s do, however, and are very much a means to get the job done with the minimum of fuss.

Installation

I’m assuming Mac OS X as the platform (since that’s what I’m using), though they should work fine on Linux. You’ll need HandBrakeCLI (get the nightly version). I’ve also made use of mediainfo and gseq (part of GNU Coreutils), both of which can be installed via Homebrew.

MakeMKV

Both scripts assume a starting point of either an MKV file (in the case of rip-movie) or a directory containing MKV files of each episode (for rip-episodes). Use MakeMKV to rip the disc into a full-fat MKV file (or folder of files).

rip-movie

Pass the script the MKV file that represents the main title of the disc:

rip-movie movie.mkv

By default, the English Dolby Digital track will be selected, as well as any forced subtitles in English. The output file (by default the same name as the input) will be written to ~/Movies. You can make use of find-movie and have it pull the correct movie name and year of release. For example:

rip-movie -d 'hunt for red october'

will output to ~/Movies/The Hunt for Red October (1990).mkv.

The frame rate (and whether it’s constant or variable) will be pulled from the source file. Extra options or configuration details can be found by looking at the help text:

rip-movie -h

rip-episodes

Here’s the idea: you’ve ripped the first four episodes of a TV show you want to watch them. You might have a directory tree that looks like this, after ripping the disc with MakeMKV:

GILMORE_GIRLS_S2_D1e01-4/
├── title01.mkv
├── title02.mkv
├── title03.mkv
└── title04.mkv

Simply run the following command to correctly name these files:

rip-episodes -e GILMORE_GIRLS_S2_D1e01-4/ -p Gilmore-Girls -s02 01-4

The name prefix for each file must be passed, as well as the season number. The last item to pass to the script is the episode list. Either make this a list of episodes (e.g., 1 2 3 4), or a range like 01-4. Prefix one of the single-digit numbers with a zero and all the numbers will have that prefix, in effect giving you 01 02 03 04, which looks neater. You’ll end up with these files in ~/Movies:

Gilmore-Girls-S02E01.mkv
Gilmore-Girls-S02E02.mkv
Gilmore-Girls-S02E03.mkv
Gilmore-Girls-S02E04.mkv

All files will be subject to the same settings as with rip-movie: English language Dolby Digital sound track (where possible), and forced subtitles. Use a wrapper script like the following to batch convert several folders (discs) at once:

#!/bin/bash -

title="$1"
season="$2"

for i in */; do
    rip-episodes -p "$title" -s"$season" -e "$i" $(echo "$i" | sed -E 's_.+[Ee]([0-9]+-[0-9]+)/?_\1_g')
done

(This assumes the directory names end with the episode range, such as e01-4 above.)

find-movie

Takes a movie name as its first argument and returns the correct title and year of its release. Queries the TMDb API using tmdbsimple, so install that first:

pip install tmdbsimple

Register for an API key with TMDb, and put it in the file ~/.tmdb_api_key.

Run the script by passing the movie name as the first argument:

❯ python find-movie TOP_GUN
Top Gun (1986)

If a movie can’t be found, it’ll return error code 1 and report it:

❯ python find-movie AAAAA
find-movie: movie not found

The movie returned will be the most popular one found that matches the string passed, and unicode characters will be replaced to allow for filesystem compatibility:

❯ python find-movie 'the italian job'
The Italian Job (2003)

❯ python find-movie amelie
Am?lie (2001)