DVD backups under Linux

I'm running Ubuntu 11.10 and needed to backup some DVD movies. Some available tools a quick web search suggested were:

• dvdrip and acidrip, which both are frontends to (1) rip a movie from a disk and (2) to decode it (with mencoder?) to some more compact format such as divx, mpeg4 etc.
• brasero allows one to create an iso-image of the disk.
• Alternatively, one can use dvdbackup, i.e., simply type
      dvdbackup -M -i /dev/dvd -o ./dvdbackup/movie-abc
  which creates the DVD file structure into the given directory.
  

Brasero turned out to be an easy tool for my purpose, as at this stage I did not want to decode the videos, but just to take backups. First everything went smoothly, until Brasero gave an error with one disk. At this point, I started to check other tools more closely. First one, dvdbackup, was not succesful either but reported

"Error cracking CSS key"

However, dvdrip was able to extract also the problematic movie and gave me an avi-file. Acidrip I did not try at this point. All along I did have appropriate libdvdread libraries installed.

I still wanted to use brasero, and in the end I tried setting a proper region code with regionset command. This solved the reading problem with brasero and dvdbackup. I do not know why dvdrip was OK without the regioncode setting.

In addition to the above, I also tried Thoggen, which decodes a movie. Unfortunately there was something wrong with resulting stream (missing frames?). There is also k9copy tool, which I have not tried (yet).

LG Flatron L193ST and startup problems

After some 5-6 years, my monitor started to show problems when starting. In the end, the blue-yellow led around the start button would simply blink for something like 15 minutes before the monitor started. And the delay appeared to prolong everytime. Once up and running, there were no more problems.