Someone recently asked me to record something for their university assignment. Guess what format the lecturer required. Not something from this century like ogg, mp3 or even CD. They wanted a cassette tape apparently‽ Converting to older formats is generally more difficult than to newer formats, but with the equipment at my disposal I used the sequence below. This post is really about how impressed I was with the tools readily available on my linux laptop to convert the DVD-VR into an audio CD.

	→		→		→
		DVD-VR		CDR		cassette

DVD-VR to Audio CD

I do very little "multimedia stuff", but I found it surprisingly easy to do this conversion with the tools that were already present my linux laptop. I don't even want to think about what collection of GUI tools I would need to download, install and fumble with on windos to achieve this. The linux commands I used were:

dvd-vr -p2 -n- VR_MANGR.IFO VR_MOVIE.VRO |              #extract program 2 to vob
mplayer -ao pcm -vo null -vc dummy -                    #extract 48000Hz AC3 audio from vob
sox audiodump.wav -r 44100 -s -w cdaudio.wav            #downsample wav to CD rate
sudo cdrecord -v dev=/dev/cdrom -audio -pad cdaudio.wav #burn audio CD from wav

It's a pity that mplayer wasn't amenable to piping the audio, but if this is a requirement I'm sure there are other tools available (like ffmpeg for example) to extract the audio from the vob data.