need ability to select/exclude cells in a title

[Benjamin Drung]

I'm not an expert on DVD protection mechanisms, but I understand some emply inserting invalid cells in a title's stream, usually at the beginning and end, and sometimes in the middle. For instance, Good Luck Chuck adds several 0.176 second cells at the beginning and end of the feature title. This messes up older decrypters such as the original DVDDecrypter for Windows when ripping in file mode. However, that can be worked around by ripping in IFO mode and deselecting those cells.

dvdbackup has the ability to select a title and a starting/ending chapter, but does not have the ability to select or remove cells within chapters that have more than one cell. This would be a very nice feature to have. I would suggest a syntax such as -x 1,2,3,4,5,6,32,33,34,35.

Adding this feature would allow an all-linux solution to ripping at least certain protected DVDs that currently need Windows tools. Between lsdvd and dvdbackup, one would have the ability to fully map and rip a feature title on linux.

Please see the attached dvdbackup_example.txt file as an example. In this example, "dvdbackup -t 1" fails because of the protected cells at the beginning of chapter 1. "dvdbackup -t 1 -s 2 -e 24" works, but excludes the first 4+ minutes in chapter 1 (cell 7). If we had the ability to exclude cells 1-6, and 32-35, we could successfully rip the entire feature.

Alternative syntax (more brief):
-x 1-6,32-
or
-l 7-31
This is similar to the syntax used by the UNIX cut command where multiple
fields and ranges of fields can be specified in a single argument.

Using this style could also allow the -s and -e options to be specified in
a single option as well, such as:
-c 2-24
using the example in the original submission.