Re: [dvd::rip] Quality Issues??

Benjamin Lewis wrote:

> PROBLEM 1: INSTALLATION IS TOO DIFFICULT
> SOLUTION: THE DEVELOPER SHOULD WRITE AN INSTALLATION SCRIPT, OR SOLICIT
> OTHERS TO WRITE AN INSTALLATION SCRIPT WHICH WILL CHECK FOR DEPPENDENCIES
> AND DOWNLOAD THEM FROM PUBLIC DEPOSITORIES AS REQUIRED.

(first a side note: writing in capitals is like screaming - and somwhat
impolite. You shouldn't do that if you claim to do constructive 
critisism)

dvd::rip itself has only three (!) mandatory dependencies: a) Perl Gtk,
b) transcode, c) ImageMagick - I don't count Perl itself, don't know one
distro which doesn't has it. All the other tools are optional and you 
only need to install them if you need the functionality.

dvd::rip *has* dependency checking, recommends version numbers and so 
on. The documentation covers all dependencies. But building binary 
installation packages is out of the scope of *most* Linux based Open 
Source software because there are hundrets of Linux distributions out 
there, many of them with different package management systems.

I personally use only one distribution (Debian) and so I wouldn't have 
the ability to create packages for other distros. For Debian Christian 
Marillat does a magnificant job! You just type "apt-get install dvdrip"
and you're done. Obviously you're either using the wrong distribution or
(more likely) no or bad binary packages for your distro.

Nevertheless there is a team of guys who do a fair job of creating 
binary packages for the major Linux distributions, including all 
important dependencies. The installation documentation mentions these 
*and* recommends using these packages instead of suggesting to reinvent
the wheel and install all the programs by hand. The corresponding 
chapter stands before the source installation description, what more can
I do?

And even if you need to build transcode by hand - it has a very good 
INSTALL document and it's not too hard to get it right.

> 2. As a linux user, I am generaly satisfied and impressed with the stability
> of the linux operating system and it's associated open source software. As a
> beta tester and developer, I understand that there are occassional bugs in
> software which appear intermintently. A problem I have noticed with dvdrip,
> is that there are bugs which cross versions, (including transcode). These
> bugs include out of sync audio (even with PSU score enabled and regardless
> of framerate or container), missing frame grabs (which make it impossible to
> continue ripping/re-encoding) and incomplete encodings (for some reason,
> regardless of the settings, transcode just stops processing the movie, cpu
> usage drops to zero and the progress bar just stops). I have researched
> these issues and have found various fixes. These fixes included upgrading or
> downgrading transcode and other relevant software, recompling with an
> upgraded or downgraded compiler, trying a different movie, blah blah blah.
> The only problem these solutions solved was the problem with transcode
> halting while executing.

As Mark stated already: you're complaining about transcode issues at the
wrong place. But I don't want to bash transcode here: the transcode guys
do a great job! Yes, current releases may have some problems, but it 
works for most people. And older releases (e.g. 0.6.14) are very stable
and fully supported by dvd::rip, and I always recommend this version if
people encounter problems with the newer releases. And I think the 
number of bug reports is really small compared to the number of 
dvd::rip/transcode users out there, so I think you draw a very black 
painting here, wrongly.

> PROBLEM 2: THE SOFTWARE IS NOT RELIABLE
> SOLUTION: WORK ON A RELEASE CANADIT, PAY ATTENTION TO YOUR BUG REPORTS, STOP
> BEING NAIVE, POSSIBLY INTEGRATE DVDRIP AND TRANSCODE INTO ONE PROJECT.

Wow, this is really impertinent and nearly a personal attack. You tell 
me I don't pay attention to bug reports? Guy, please crawl through the 
mailing list archive. I'm naive? Why exactly? Obviously I'm missing some
arguments here... You suggest integrating transcode and dvd::rip into 
one project? You don't know what you're talking about! transcode has 
*much* more use cases than just copying DVD's. It has a completely 
different development team and style, uses a different programming 
language and much more. It's a command line tool with many GUI 
interfaces (dvd::rip is not alone ;), and that's good. So please stop 
being naive (hehe, 1:0 for me ;)

> 3. As a customer and business owner, I have reviewed the dvdrip website. The
> faq, while acceptable, doesn't answer 5% of the questions which I have read
> on your mailing list,

If I would add every mailing list question to the FAQ it wouldn't be a 
FAQ (*F*requently Asked Questions) anymore - and thus very unreadable 
and unusable.

> and your web site also doesn't provide a decent
> contact us page.

  Next point for me, intermediate result: 2:0
  http://www.exit1.org/dvdrip/support.cipp

> I understand that your organization, (if I can even call it
> that), is not making a profit and therefore cannot afford or spend the time
> to have a contact us page, the very least you could do is have a search
> engine so that others can find answers to their questions about why your
> program doesn't work.

  Ups, 3:0
  http://www2.exit1.org/archive/dvdrip-users/

  (The menu item on the homepage is called "SEARCH ARCHIVE" -
   what exactly did you not understand with this phrase?)

> This is all I am going write for now, I have wasted enough time on this.

I'm sorry, but thanks anyway for your constructive critisism.

> If you don't agree flame away, if You do agree I appreciate it, regardless.
> this software needs work. Fix the damn bugs!!!!!!

Which exactly? I don't have a proper bug report from you, so how should
I fix these "damn bugs"?

> I have spent well over 400
> hours trying to get it to work. I have a list of at least 7 movies which
> will not get sync'd audio, all ntsc. Whatever.

Indeed, whatever.

Regards,

Joern

-- 
sub i($){print$_[0]}*j=*ENV;sub w($){sleep$_[0]}sub _($){i"$p:$c> ",w+01
,$_=$_[0],tr;i-za-h,;a-hi-z ;,i$_,w+01,i"\n"}$|=1;$f='HO';($c=$j{PWD})=~
s+$j{$f."ME"}+~+;$p.="$j{USER}\@".`hostname`;chop$p;_"kl",$c='~',_"zu,".
"-zn,*",_"#,epg,lw,gwc,mfmkcbm,cvsvwev,uiqt,kwvbmvb?",i"$p:$c> ";w+1<<07
pgpVUsjZRERNK.pgp
Description: PGP signature