mencoder and mplayer woes

dear mencoder- and mplayer- experts:

I want to archive my DVDs, and put the physical media into my basement. So I want to rip them to my hard drive in a way that preserves quality, both in audio 5.1 and video. I believe this means that I cannot go to mp3, but should stick to -oac "copy". For compatibility with other devices (e.g., DLink DSM-520), -ovc xvid seems to be a good encoder. Avi is probably a good container. (DVDs do not seem to have a container; they seem to have a filesystem. Then again, I don't understand all of this.) as a novice, I would have loved a "shrink-dvd" wrapper that just chooses good settings and does it all. alas, it isn't so easy. now, the best instructions I have yet found about mencoder was at not answer all questions. still, it tells me I need something like

$ mencoder dvd:--oac copy -ovc xvid -xvidencopts pbutt=1 -odev-null $ mencoder dvd:--oac copy -ovc xvid -xvidencopts pbutt=2:bitrate=1500 -o mydvd.avi

and it seems to work, at least for the video. at this bitrate, a 7.4GB DVD becomes about 1.6GB.

alas, I still have a whole set of problems:

1 all other applications (incl. xine, realplayer, xmms) are perfectly happy to play audio on my alsa device. alas, mplayer (1.0pre8-3.4.6) remains mute. mplayer even tells me alsa-init: using device iec958:{CARD 0 AES0 0x02 AES1 0x82 AES2 0x00 AES3 0x02} alsa: 48000 Hz-2 channels-4 bpf-65536 bytes buffer-Signed 16 bit Little Endian AO: alsa 48000Hz 2ch ac3 (1 bytes per sample) but no sound is coming. is there any special magic it needs? (a related problem is that I cannot check mencoder's output to see if it contains audio, because xine does not like to play xvid avi files on my machine---a minor mystery; it plays DVDs very nicely.)

2 I already have many DVDs that have been ripped to the hard drive with dvdbackup. this creates a directory that contains many files (IFO, BUP, VOB), but I have not figured out how to tell mencoder to encode the entire directory into an avi xvid file. is there some magic incantation that replicate "dvd:--" for hard-drive based file contents?

3 another mystery---what does the following output of mencoder to my above incantations mean?

Too many video packets in the buffer: (4096 in 8265317 bytes). The selected videoout device is incompatible with this codec. Try adding the scale filter, e.g. -vf spp,scale instead of -vf spp.

4 mencoder also tells me about a lot of duplicate frames on my dvd. is this normal and best to be ignored?

$ mencoder MEncoder 1.0pre8-3.4.6 (C) 2000-2006 MPlayer Team CPU: AMD Athlon(tm) 64 Processor 3000+ (Family: 15, Model: 4, Stepping: 10) CPUflags: Type: 15 MMX: 1 MMX2: 1 3DNow: 1 3DNow2: 1 SSE: 1 SSE2: 1 Compiled for x86 CPU with extensions: MMX MMX2 3DNow 3DNowEx SSE SSE2

93 audio & 211 video codecs No file given

any advice appreciated.

sincerely,

iaw