timothy's Journal: Best way to extract just the *sound* from a DVD / MP4 / etc?

When I'm walking around, or (though this doesn't apply at the current house) doing something like mowing the lawn, or driving, sometimes I'd rather listen to a movie -- one I like, and where the dialogue lets me picture the action -- than to music, or silence, or NPR's Pledge Month begging. Many movies (not all) are well tracked enough that they can be listened to nearly like radio dramas, esp. if you've seen them at least once the regular way.

However, other than the awkward and kludgy method of hooking up a recorder to the headphone out jack and recording just the audio (stereo is fine, surround sound would be lost anyhow), what's the best way (on a system running Ubuntu Linux) to derive from a movie an audio-only version? Like with my just-delivered 10th Anniversary Big Lebowski DVD, packaged in a (purely decorative) bowling ball.

Exact type of audio is not a big deal; Flac / Ogg / MP3, though most likely eventual destination is MP3. I'm looking for audio file, not audiophile.

It seems like this should be an easy thing to figure out, but after a while of idly thinking about it, I sure haven't hit it yet.

Any ideas?

try this

[technewsreader]

it's free :) http://www.aoamedia.com/audioextractor.htm [aoamedia.com] or use, erightsoft super (encode to mp3 only) these may not work for dvd and

Re:

[timothy]

Looks like that requires Windows, though. Thanks anyhow -- perhaps I'll at some point have a good-enough Windows machine around to play with.

mplayer -dumpaudio

[cerberusss]

I think you can do this with the following command:

mplayer -dumpaudio -dumpfile audio.mp3 dvd://1

I haven't tried this, though.

Re:

[timothy]

Will have to give that one a try :) On the relevant system, however, I haven't even yet worked to get DVD playback working yet (it's running Ubuntu 9.4 alpha ... I suppose I will upgrade to the beta before I do much else :)

That certainly looks like a reasonable command line though -- thanks.

Re:

[crumley]

Yeah, it seems like mplayer should work directly, but I couldn't get it to dump straight to mp3. I had to dump the audio to avi and then convert that to mp3. Also, you need to be careful with the dvd titles/track numbers. The first one isn't always the one that you want. Sometimes previews, or other features are first on the DVD.

Virtualdub

[sakdoctor]

I'm pretty sure Virtualdub can open VOB files.
Then you can set the video to none and the audio to your favourite codec, and save.

Re:

[timothy]

Hmm. Virtualdub requires Windows, though, doesn't it? I have a laptop somewhere that has Windows loaded (whatever Windows came on laptops in 2000 ... XP, I think), but the DVD drive is basically busted, as are are a few other parts of that machine ;) I'll look into this if I change into a handy Windows machine. Thanks.

dvd2mp3

[crumley]

I had the same problem, so I wrote a very basic Perl script that does this and put it up on Sourceforge - dvd2mp3 [sourceforge.net]. It relies on mplayer, lame, and some Perl libs to do most of the work. It has a very basic text interface. It runs on Linux and probably anything else that will run those programs.

I use is mostly for converting musics DVDs (videos, concerts, etc.) to mp3s, so I usually care about track names. If you are not worried about tracks names, it might be overkill. Ah well, another idea of an option

Re:

[timothy]

Awesome! Right now I am away from my personal HQ (Seattle) on a trip, while the computer on which I would like this to run is not. But this is purpose built for what I want -- thanks for pointing it out.