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I've been using Linux since 1999, beginning with Red Hat. In about 2001 I switched to Mandrake, and until recently used Mandriva 2010.2.

I discovered LXF about nine months ago, while working away from home in a town which actually had a newsstand that carried it! After my work ended there, I bought a subscription.

Your coverage of Mandriva's financial woes, along with your reviews of other distros have been very useful to me; thank you. Mandriva seems to be a sinking ship, and it seems sensible to make a change. I've tried Ubuntu 11.04 and 11.10, OpenSUSE 11.4, Fedora 16, and Mint's 11 and 12.

I settled on Mint 12, when it came out with its KDE release, and I immediately and successfully updated KDE to 4.8. I am very impressed with the recognition of devices and overall useablity of Mint.

One area is giving me some trouble, and I'm hoping you can help?

I have a large family, and we buy quite a few movies on DVD. Keeping up with them was difficult, not to mention they quickly became scratched and unuseable. My solution was to purchase a large external USB hard drive, and rip the movies to this drive. The drive is connected to a server in my home, and through the local LAN each family member can access movies at their leisure.

With Mandriva versions going back for years, I have been able to use any number of methods to rip these movies. My preferred tool has been K3B, which has a very simple GUI that with just a couple clicks will turn 4GB of .VOBs into an 800MB .avi. I've also used vobcopy and avidemux with great success.

With Mint 12, K3B's ripping feature seems to be disabled. I read somewhere that I could enable the feature if I compiled K3B myself, but my attempts to do so failed. It was then I discovered that vobcopy also does not work. It fails with a write error, and a suggestion to not use -l, which I wasn't using anyway. DVDrip gets partway through the movie, and terminates with this error:

"It seems that transcode ripping stopped short. The movie has 200981 frames, but only 75377 were ripped. This is most likely a problem with your transcode/libdvdread installation, resp. a problem with this specific DVD."

I have installed the restricted codecs, including libdvdcss and libdvdread. I've tried numerous DVDs, so I'm sure it's not just a problem with one disk. I can still rip these DVDs with my last remaining machine still running Mandriva 2010.2.

I realize the movie industry would like to eliminate the ability to copy these movies, but I have purchased the movie and simply want to use it on a different medium. This is, in my opinion, fair use. Can you shed some light on this problem?

Thanks.

[wyliecoyoteuk]

K9copy and Arista are good ripping/transcoding tools.

Make sure you have enough space in he temporary directory that is used for caching the files, some programs put this in /var, for example, and if you have a small / partition and a separate /home partition, you can run out of space in /var.
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