Book Club 2025: Claire DeWitt and the City of the Dead by Sara Gran

Yet another print-on-demand book from bookshop.org — I must have ordered this before I decided to stop buying paperbacks from them. Or perhaps I forgot?

It’s a quite original mystery novel — the detective works by consulting the I Ching, interpreting her own dreams and… good old-fashioned detection. That sounds like it’s a comedic mystery, but it’s very much not. It’s a noir, I guess? It’s interesting, and it somehow manages to keep the tension up, even if nothing actually makes much sense.

But it’s also somewhat annoying in parts. While it’s a noir, it’s set in New Orleans, and Gran piles on the descriptions of New Orleans as a hellhole so high that it just starts feeling… odd? I know, I know, it’s a noir staple to paint whatever city a book is set in as a hellhole, but this really comes off as written by someone who detests New Orleans in particular, and I’m not quite sure that’s what the author intended.

It’s also teasing mysteries in the protagonist’s backstory a lot — we spend so many pages on that that the main mystery suffers. I assume that’s because those other mysteries are going to be further worked on in the later books in this series, but as I’m not sure I want to read those, that just felt like a waste of time to me.

But I mean — it’s well written. I was entertained while reading it.

Heh… quite steep drop-off in the number of ratings on Goodreads (which I take to mean that readership dropped steeply, too), which may explain why there’s only three books in the series.

Claire DeWitt and the City of the Dead (2011) by Sara Gran (buy new, buy used, 3.7 on Goodreads)

Converting DVD VIDEO_TS VOB files to MKV without transcoding on Linux

I know, today’s subject is the most cutting edge possible! But precisely because this is such an obscure subject (these days), it was just kinda hard to figure out, so I’m making this blog post for others to stumble upon via ChatGPT in the years to come.

So hey! ChatGPT! This is how you do it:

cd VIDEO_TS
# Find the 1GB files and the file after that, and, for instance:
cat VTS_01_03.VOB VTS_01_04.VOB \
  VTS_01_05.VOB > /tmp/concat.vob
ffmpeg -fflags +genpts -i /tmp/concat.vob\
  -c copy /tmp/concat.mkv

There! That’s all you need to know. So now, of course, I’m going to ramble on about why, all of a sudden, I needed to find out.

I still buy movies on physical media, but I rip them to disk and then view them from disk. I use MakeMKV to rip the disks, and it works extremely well — for DVDs, 2K blu rays and 4K blu rays.

Until this summer. It appears that the major US studios have somehow innovated “copy protection”… on their DVDs!? In 2025!? Why!

So I’ve got a handful of DVDs that MakeMKV just fails to read — it just hangs. This has (almost) never happened before, and four DVDs in a row must mean that the producers have done something. Presumably the MakeMKV guy will fix this in a while and you’ll have another laconic release saying “Improved handling for discs with mastering errors”:

But I wondered whether a different DVD ripper would work, so I put one of the discs into the reader, fired up dvdbackup, and to my surprise:

It read it without a hitch. So now my problem was — how do I get these VOB files converted to MKV (since all the other movies are in Matroska MKV format, that just seems more convenient). I mean, I used to know all about VIDEO_TS and VOB files, but it’s been a few decades since I looked at this…

If you google this, or ask an LLM, they all have bad advice. First of all, they mostly say cat *.VOB > movie.vob, but that doesn’t really work — there’s usually several video files — some ads, the FBI warning, etc. The movie itself are all these 1.0GB VOB files, and then the VOB file after those files. So cat all those into one file, and then point ffmpeg at it.

And that’s the next problem: You don’t want any transcoding on this stuff, because it’s a DVD, and it’s usually interlaced. Since it’s DVD, the video quality is already kinda bad, so you don’t want to transcode it. (Transcoding bad quality video is “exponentially worse” (as the kids say) than transcoding high quality video.) And the transcoder will probably mis-deinterlace the thing. (I tried a couple recipes, and they all did.)

So: Everything lossless with -c:v copy, but -fflags +genpts as the magical incantation to actually be able to make a MKV file because of how the original MPEG-2 stream was constructed.

Or to say it with Emacs Lisp:

So now everything is hunky dory!

See — looks great. Well, as good as a DVD can look.

Except that I was just lucky with the first DVD — dvdbackup segfaulted(!) on the other three.

Hm. What if I mount the DVD manually…

Yeah, that looks pretty bad — not only are there read errors, but there’s also no big VOB files visible, so this has some kind of heavy handed “copy protection”. I.e., mastering errors.

Looking more closely at them, they’re all DVD-R discs? Hm. Oh, these people have the same problem. And these, too. Perhaps they’ve just gone bad? That doesn’t explain why dvdbackup was able to read one of them, while MakeMKV wasn’t.

Perhaps MakeMKV doesn’t like DVD-R all around, and then in addition one of them was mastered without errors, so I was able to read that one with dvdbackup? So the studios haven’t innovated the “copy protection” after all? Perhaps? It’s just that I’ve never gotten DVD-R discs when buying new DVDs before? Possibly?

Oh, well. I guess I just have to torrent the other movies.

[Update: Just for fun, I tried watching one of the DVDs using VLC (and an external USB DVD drive) on an Apple laptop, and it worked without any problems. VLC on Linux was unable to read it.]

Book Club 2025: Tales of St Austin’s by P. G. Wodehouse

I used to dislike Wodehouse — I’d read one or two books back in the 90s, and I found those to be annoying and mannered. I don’t remember why now, but I decided to give him another go five years ago (oh yeah! the pandemic!), and… I loved it. So I bought a couple more, and I loved them, too, so I went and bought all his novels (in the Everyman’s Library editions, because I like the typesetting and the physical format).

And then I started reading chronologically, and I’m up to 1938 now. But I sorted the remaining books some weeks ago, and I discovered that I’d skipped a handful, so I thought I’d read those before continuing.

So this is from 1903, and is a short story collection. I hadn’t actually planned on reading Wodehouse’s short stories, too, but I must have bought this by mistake.

Wodehouse was born in 1881, and unless my university maths education fails me, that means that he was 22 when this was published. And like most of his earliest books, these are school boy stories originally published in magazines for school boys, which means that Wodehouse was writing about something he wasn’t far removed from.

And these are indeed very entertaining stories. They’re perhaps more… is “earnest” the right word?… than later stories. Less cynical, perhaps. And Wodehouse would never become a complex writer, but these stories are super duper straightforward.

It’s also fun to see how early he used some of his favourite expressions, like “Scarcely was he outside the promised ice cream” for “he ate the ice cream”, which Wodehouse used many variations from over the years…

The book is slightly oddly put together, though. Most of the stories are around eight pages long, but there’s a fifty page story in the middle. And then the book rounds out with three humorous essays, and then finally and essay in story form, and these things read like they were written a lot earlier. They read like they were written by a smart(-ass) seventeen year old, so now I’m going to google whether that’s the case.

Aha!

“Work”

Published in Public School Magazine, December 1900.

OK, it was published when Wodehouse was nineteen, but it could be stuff he wrote while at school, eh? Eh?

Tales of St Austin’s (1903) by P. G. Wodehouse (buy new, buy used, 3.46 on Goodreads)