Q. I would like to play this DVD online - how do I do that?

A. Websites nowadays are using swf and flv file formats to play videos hosted on their site or sites, it's advantage is clear in that the file itself is often in comparison to regular video format files, smaller and easier to upload so the site is able to hold and run more video content with much less bandwidth than would normally be required. There are various methods to do the conversion.

For demonstration purposes, we have used Ubuntu linux, but the software is available under all modern distributions of linux as well as Windows.

1. First install the required software:

sudo apt-get install mencoder

sudo apt-get install mplayer

2. The next step is to dump the video stream. In this step the video is converted from many chapters into one big chapter:

mplayer dvd://1 -dumpstream -dumpfile ~/conference.vob

Where dvd://1 is your dvd device. It doesn't have to be a physical device, can be an ISO image:

mplayer conference.iso -dumpstream -dumpfile ~/conference.vob

3. Finally, the conversion to FLV format:

mencoder conference.vob -of lavf -ovc lavc -lavcopts vcodec=flv:vbitrate=150 -ofps 25 -oac mp3lame -lameopts abr:br=32 -srate 44100 -vf scale=720 -o conference.flv

Related links:

You will need something like this in order to play the video on your site:

http://www.longtailvideo.com/players/jw-flv-player/

Versions of mplayer and mencoder can be downloaded from here

http://www.mplayerhq.hu

http://wiki.soslug.org/wiki/vob_to_flv