Debian Package of the Day (static archived copy)

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Thoggen is a GTK+ based DVD ripper with very simple user interface. The name is based on the fact that it outputs the video to Theora/Ogg format.

Thoggen uses GStreamer 0.10 for video encoding. Although currently it supports only Theora/Vorbis/Ogg output, more formats can be expected in the future.

The good:

• Very simple user interface.
• Supports cropping, setting resolution of output, choosing output quality or size. You can also add title and comment meta data to the output file.
• Outputs to Theora/Vorbis/Ogg which truly Frees your video.
• Can be used with DVD as well as with a directory containing DVD files.

The bad:

• Currently it only supports single audio track.
• There is no support for subtitles. The workaround is to rip subtitles manually with help of programs like subtitleripper. According to an informal conversation on IRC, support for multiple audio tracks as well as subtitles is in development.

The ugly:

• Theora encoding is usually slower than other video formats.

Screenshots

Following are the screenshots of an example ripping workflow.

Title selection dialog

Encoding options

Encoding window

The package is available in Debian since Etch and in Ubuntu since Dapper. The upstream development is a bit slow but many features are planned for future releases.