Ripping Audio from a DVD

I was recently asked to get the audio from a DVD and place it on a portable media player. Here's how I did it, using Ubuntu 7.04.

1. Installed mplayer from the repositories

2. played the various chapter until I found the one I was looking for. This can be a bit of a hit and miss process, as DVD's often have rather strange title/chapter builds. The command is:

mplayer dvd://4

Where the "4" refers to the title number. This particular DVD has 6 titles. Apart from playing the chapter, you'll see a bunch of stuff in the console window. click "x" to stop playing. The output includes the following:

Playing dvd://4.
There are 6 titles on this DVD.
There are 2 chapters in this DVD title.
There are 1 angles in this DVD title.
audio stream: 0 format: ac3 (stereo) language: en aid: 128.
audio stream: 1 format: ac3 (stereo) language: zh aid: 129.
number of audio channels on disk: 2.
number of subtitles on disk: 0
MPEG-PS file format detected.
VIDEO: MPEG2 720x480 (aspect 2) 29.970 fps 7500.0 kbps (937.5 kbyte/s)
xscreensaver_disable: Could not find XScreenSaver window.
GNOME screensaver disabled

3. The red text above shows the information I needed. There were two audio tracks for this title, I was after the english (en) version. The command to extract the audio is: (This is meant to be all on one line)

mplayer -vc null -vo null -aid 128 -ao pcm:fast:waveheader:file=output.wav dvd://4 -chapter 1-2

The "128" refers to the audio track found in step 2.
"Output.wav" is the output file name.
chapter 1-2 means I want the audio from both chapters. "2-2" would have taken only the second.

4. Import the wav file into audacity, a superb audio editor.

5. I then used audacity to crop and normalize the audio I wanted, including adding nice fade ins and outs.

6. I Again in audacity, export the audio to mp3.

All Done.

References:

Most of this is derived from this post on the Ubuntu forums.