Just wanted to mention somewhat unpleasant results of ripping a DVD with
mplayer on a windows box. I'm not doing it every day, so I might have missed it somewhere in the documentation. It was a one-off deal, since I didn't have a unix box with a DVD reader at the time. So I ripped the video stream, audio stream and subtitles. I then encoded video with 2pass DivX, audio with ac3 on the same windows box. And when I tried playing the file on my unix box, I started having all kinds of problems:
mplayer had to reindex the whole video stream, subtitles were garbled etc. The same file was playing fine on the windows box. After I reencoded the file on a unix box with -ovc copy -oac copy, all problems went away with the exception of garbled subtitles.
And then I looked inside the subtitles files. It turns out that
mplayer on windows adds windows EOL(end-of-line) characters to the files it generates.
Mplayer on unix(at least my
FreeBSD box) has a big problem with these characters(but not the other way around). After I removed these EOLs, everything went back to normal. So those, who encode (or create any new files) with mplayer on windows, beware of the EOLs.