Can't rip DVDs in mythdvd

Hello and thank you for reporting.
Just to clarify things, is the original error message regarding the directory "/share/Movies/dvd" and the one you receive when trying "Good" quality different? If so, what is the error?
The directory "/share/Movies/dvd" is the default directory which is configurable through the frontend. So, whether or not the transcode daemon not creating the directory is a bug is rather subjective. Any thoughts?

There are several issues at hand here. The big one is that the user running mtd needs to have access to the "cdrom" group. libdvdcss2 will need to be installed if the user wants to be able to rip commercial dvds. I will look into the directories. With feisty, I plan to standardize everything among directories to be in something sane like /media for all the plugins and recordings.

Just a note, for others brought here by the error message, that one sets the directory that DVD are ripped to in MythVideo settings, not MythDVD settings. I set it to /var/lib/mythvideo/ and it worked fine. (You could probably add dvd to that if you created the directory, it all depends how you want to manage your Videos, myth can use the directory structure).

Quite likely, then, that this is a bug report for MythVideo, which should have its default path set to match the Ubuntu packages, which implies /var/lib/mythvideo under the current set-up.

Apart from the directory path problem, which I also ran into, two other issues with ripping with Good or Medium settings is that the mythdvd calls transcode which in turn uses xvid to compress the video. If transcode and the xvid libraries are not installed, it will rip the dvd but not transcode. Perhaps transcode and the xvid libraries need to be made dependencies of mythdvd.

Considering that the DVD can be transcoded into a multitude of formats, I think a suggests would be more appropriate. transcode is already a suggests. Aside from that, I was under the impression that you had to set the risky DEB_BUILD_OPTIONS to get the Edgy ffmpeg package to support xvid. I don't think requiring libxvidcore/transcode would make any difference in that case as the binary packages are built without it. Is the case different in the libavcodec package you are using, Chess?

Jeremy, thanks for your reply. I am using the standard ubuntu edgy binaries for mythtv, transcode, ffmpeg, et al, and installing transcode and the xvid libraries allows me to rip at the good and medium settings.

I understand your point on the suggests, and maybe that is indeed the right way to go. However, one counter argument is this: the default mythdvd plugin uses transcode and a default setting in mythdvd is enabled to use xvid (as opposed to divx, I believe). So, if a new user just installs mythdvd without installing transcode and libxvidcore, then the default out-of-the-box settings do not work and hence mythdvd does not work. True, one can always change the settings and encode into a different format, but presumably at that point the user would know that other packages would need to be installed for that different format to work. But, for a working out-of-the-box mythdvd with no changes to the default settings, maybe requiring transcode and libxvidcore might be appropriate. I think the same argument might apply to the default path issue. Certainly one can change the path and make any necessary directories for that different path, but the _default_ path does not work. I think perhaps the default path should be one that will exist on any myth install, e.g. /var/lib/mythdvd or /var/lib/mythvideo as the case may be.

I've been having similar problems with ripping dvds into MythTV. I think that it has to do with a transcode problem, although transcode is installed. When I rip a dvd as an ISO or as "Perfect" quality it works. But when I rip a DVD with any lower quality options like "Good" or "Excellent" it goes through the ripping portion and stops. I can see the file did rip into /var/lib/mythdvd/temp/, but after it stops the file is deleted. I've attached the mtd.log file from these transcodings.

The original issue at hand here, messed up directories should be resolved. The default directory is now /var/lib/mythtv/videos. The other issue, with the user being in the cdrom group is also resolved via the autologin script. If there are any other related issues, please file them in a separate bug.