[dvd::rip] Quality Issues??

Greetings, dvdrip users,

The purpose of this message is to inform you of my opinion on the current status of dvdrip and it's future development.  This is a well thought opionion, formed after months of using the program, trying various settings, waiting hours for the results and finally judging them.

Based on what I have seen, I am very impressed with dvdrip and what it is able to accomplish.  Based on what I have seen, dvdrip is most likely one of the most versital ripping programs around, however, with that said, I do have some constructive critisism which I feel needs to be said.  Before I continue though, there are a few things I want to say, so I will just get into them.

1.  As a software developer, I understand that sometimes users can be very naive.  As a computer user, I also understand that sometimes it's the developer who is naive.  One of the first problems I encountered while attempting to install dvdrip was the enourmous number of dependencies which need to be installed.  I attempted to install dvdrip onto both Mandrake and Fedora 4.  On both pc's, with normal installations, it took around 6 hours to get dvdrip to run.  That speaks for itself, but on top of that, the program didn't work correctly even after it was installed correctly.

PROBLEM 1: INSTALLATION IS TOO DIFFICULT
SOLUTION:    THE DEVELOPER SHOULD WRITE AN INSTALLATION SCRIPT, OR SOLICIT OTHERS TO WRITE AN INSTALLATION SCRIPT WHICH WILL CHECK FOR DEPPENDENCIES AND DOWNLOAD THEM FROM PUBLIC DEPOSITORIES AS REQUIRED.

2. As a linux user, I am generaly satisfied and impressed with the stability of the linux operating system and it's associated open source software. As a beta tester and developer, I understand that there are occassional bugs in software which appear intermintently. A problem I have noticed with dvdrip, is that there are bugs which cross versions, (including transcode). These bugs include out of sync audio (even with PSU score enabled and regardless of framerate or container), missing frame grabs (which make it impossible to continue ripping/re-encoding) and incomplete encodings (for some reason, regardless of the settings, transcode just stops processing the movie, cpu usage drops to zero and the progress bar just stops). I have researched these issues and have found various fixes. These fixes included upgrading or downgrading transcode and other relevant software, recompling with an upgraded or downgraded compiler, trying a different movie, blah blah blah. The only problem these solutions solved was the problem with transcode halting while executing.

PROBLEM 2: THE SOFTWARE IS NOT RELIABLE
SOLUTION:    WORK ON A RELEASE CANADIT, PAY ATTENTION TO YOUR BUG REPORTS, STOP BEING NAIVE, POSSIBLY INTEGRATE DVDRIP AND TRANSCODE INTO ONE PROJECT.

3. As a customer and business owner, I have reviewed the dvdrip website. The faq, while acceptable, doesn't answer 5% of the questions which I have read on your mailing list, and your web site also doesn't provide a decent contact us page. I understand that your organization, (if I can even call it that), is not making a profit and therefore cannot afford or spend the time to have a contact us page, the very least you could do is have a search engine so that others can find answers to their questions about why your program doesn't work. The search engine would be a great place for others to post bug fixes and workarounds to errors in the software as well.

PROBLEM 3: THE SUPPORT SYSTEM NOT ACCEPTABLE
SOLUTION: AT THE VERY LEAST, DOWNLOAD AND INSTALL A WEB FORUM SO OTHERS CAN SEARCH FOR ANSWERS TO COMMON QUESTIONS, RATHER THAN RELY ON YOUR FAQ.

This is all I am going write for now, I have wasted enough time on this. If you don't agree flame away, if You do agree I appreciate it, regardless. this software needs work. Fix the damn bugs!!!!!! I have spent well over 400 hours trying to get it to work. I have a list of at least 7 movies which will not get sync'd audio, all ntsc. Whatever.