Extracting audio from a DVDEdit

Created 4/9/2007, updated 10/14/2017

Disclaimer

These are notes I made while trying to extract the audio from public domain (not copyrighted) DVDs of live convert performances. This information should not be used (and probably wouldn't help anyway) on copyrighted or copy-protected material. On the one hand, copyright law provides you with "Fair Use" rights that allow you time-shift and format-shift the content you purchased. On the other hand, laws like the DMCA make it illegal to circumvent the DRM on DVDs that you've purchased, and this DRM prevents you from exercising your Fair Use rights.

Because of the DMCA I am not going to link to software that would enable you to circumvent any DRM, nor will I provide instructions on how to do so.

Demuxing

I usually try using bbDEMUX directly on the DVD first and if that fails I fall back to using MacTheRipper to extract the VOB files and then I try running bbDEMUX on those.

bbDEMUX is fairly out of date, no Universal Binary version is available, and it runs slowly under Rosetta. The drag-and-drop feature seems broken in the main window (although dragging to the Dock icon seems to work, as does the "Open" item in the "File" menu). bbDEMUX can fail even on non-copy-protected DVDs, but the MacTheRipper step often helps.

AC3 conversion

After demuxing you will have a bunch of AC3 files, one per VOB, but neither QuickTime nor iTunes can read them. See "Installing PAC (Perl Audio Converter) on Mac OS X" for a description of using PAC to perform the conversion; I've never been able to get that technique to work (I always get a message like "Unsupported codec (id=86020) for input stream #0.0").

I then tried using the "Streaming/Export Wizard" of VLC:

  1. Drag the AC3 files to the VLC playlist window.
  2. From the "File" menu choose "Streaming/Export Wizard".
  3. Choose "Transcode/Save to file".
  4. Choose an audio-only transcode. I choose to use the FLAC codec because it is lossless, and a RAW container type.

I then tried using PAC as follows:

pacpl --rawtoflac --file *.raw

I was told that I needed SoX, so I installed that (see "Installing SoX 13.0.0 on Mac OS X").

Then PAC couldn't find the sox executable so I ended up editing the configuration file at /etc/pacpl/pacpl.conf.

This time PAC worked and converted the files to FLAC. I then used flac to convert them to WAV format.

flac -d *.flac

Finally I had something I could play in iTunes (and there convert to Apple Lossless) but on playing the tracks I discovered that they were all 100% white noise. I checked and the FLAC files were white noise as well. I checked the "raw" files and VLC couldn't play them despite the fact that it created them, so here I think VLC is to blame.

I tried transcoding again, this time using FLAC/OGG instead of FLAC/RAW. The resulting OGG files couldn't be played in VLC (why then did it create them with reporting any errors?).

I decided to forget about trying with VLC. Back to trying with PAC:

pacpl --ac3towav --file *.ac3

Failed:

Unsupported codec (id=86020) for input stream #0.0

A search yielded this post: http://lists.mplayerhq.hu/pipermail/ffmpeg-user/2006-March/002426.html

So I decided to update/recompile my FFmpeg install. See "Building FFmpeg on Mac OS X".

I believe that once FFmpeg is successfully built with A52 support that the above PAC invocation will work, although a quick test with the GUI wrapper for FFMpeg (see http://www.ffmpegx.com/) yielded the following:

FFmpeg version CVS, Copyright (c) 2000-2004 Fabrice Bellard
Tue Feb 20 14:01:14 CET 2007
Mac OSX universal build for ffmpegX
  libavutil version: 49.0.0
  libavcodec version: 51.9.0
  libavformat version: 50.4.0
Input #0, ac3, from '/Users/wincent/tmp/demuxed/VTS_01_1S189SS129.ac3':
  Duration: 00:34:14.0, start: 0.000000, bitrate: 384 kb/s
  Stream #0.0: Audio: ac3, 48000 Hz, stereo, 384 kb/s
Could not find input stream #0.1

Given that I was unable to build FFmpeg I was able to use the copy which comes inside the GUI version as follows:

/Applications/ffmpegX.app/Contents/Resources/ffmpeg -ab 256 -i in.ac3 out.mp3

Not exactly the conversion I wanted (I wanted a lossless format) but it will suffice. Better:

/Applications/ffmpegX.app/Contents/Resources/ffmpeg -ab 256 -i in.ac3 out.wav

The same or similar techniques will work on AVI files:

/Applications/ffmpegX.app/Contents/Resources/ffmpeg -ab 256 -i in.avi out.mp3

Alternatives

See also vobinfo for an alternative to bbDEMUX; I've never gotten vobinfo to work.