The rumors of the death of the lsdvd project is slightly exaggerated. And the last few months, we have been working on fixing and improving it, culminating in a new release last night. This is the list of changes in the new 0.18 release, as announced on the project mailing list:
- Simplified autoconf setup, dropped --enable-debug option.
- Improved video resolution reporting (Fixes #8).
- Applied patches fetched from BSDs (Fixes #7).
- Corrected Perl output (Fixes #1).
- Adjusted Pan and Scan entries to produce valid XML.
- Changed --help output from stderr to stdout.
- Corrected aspect ratio and audio format formatting.
- Avoid segfault when hitting a NULL pointer in the IFO structure.
- Change build rules to supress compiler flags, to make it easier to spot warnings.
- Set default DVD device based on OS (Linux, *BSD, Darwin)
- Added libdvdread DVDDiscID to output.
- Corrected typo in longest track value in XML format.
- Switched XML output to use libxml to avoid string encoding issues.
- Added simple build time test suite.
- Cleaned up language code handling and adding missing mapping for language codes 'nb' and 'nn'.
- Added JSON output support using -Oj.
The most exciting news to me is easy access to the DVDDiscID, which make it a lot easier to identify DVD duplicates across a large collection of DVDs. During testing it has proved to be very effective ad identifying when DVDs in a DVD box (say all Star Wars movies) is identical to DVDs sold individually (like the same Star Wars movies packaged individually).
Because none of the current developers got access to do tarball releases on Sourceforge any more, the release is only available as a git tag in the repository. Lets hope it do not take ten years for the next release. The project are discussing to move away from Sourceforge, but it has not yet concluded.
As usual, if you use Bitcoin and want to show your support of my activities, please send Bitcoin donations to my address 15oWEoG9dUPovwmUL9KWAnYRtNJEkP1u1b.