2026-02-06
mpv has great dvd support now. The information online is pretty old so I decided to take a note here myself.
mpv dvd://0
That's it. Change 0 to a other number for other stuff. it doesn't support the menu selection.
mpv dvd://0 --stream-dump=output.vob
It will take a while, however the output is not in the correct format. You need ffmpeg to re-mux it
ffmpeg -i output.vob -c copy another.vob
These can be combined to one command:
mpv dvd://2 --stream-dump=/tmp/dump.vob && ffmpeg -i /tmp/dump.vob -c copy output.vob && rm /tmp/dump.vob
Sometimes the mpv ripping doesn't work, in this case you can back up the whole disk by using dd or cp:
cp /dev/cdrom cdrom.img
cp actually acts like dd, it's kinda crazy no one mention this.
Sometimes cp won't work and reports IO error. Use dd instead:
sudo dd if=/dev/cdrom of=output.img status=progress
Then, the backed-up disk can be played back normally with the --dvd-device parameter:
mpv dvd://0 --dvd-device=./output.img