[vox-tech] Authoring DVDs

[Peter Jay Salzman]

Hi all,

I want to author DVDs on Linux.  Nothing complicated.  I want to pop a DVD
into my set-top DVD player and have it play.  No menus, no subtitles, no
language selection, no nothing.  Pop it in, and it plays.

I know the gist of basics:
   1. Avi has to be converted to mpg
   2. I *think* the audio has to be separated and converted to wav or mp2.
   3. A strict directory structure needs to be made.
   4. iso formed with a special DVD version of mkisofs
   5. Burn the iso.

As always, the devil is in the details.

I've gone through a couple of tutorials/guides, but something always goes
wrong with one of the steps, and I don't have the time to put into this to
become an expert.  For example, the Linux Gazette had a good looking
tutorial, but I couldn't get past audio extraction.  For the time being, I
need to approach this as a dumb user.

Does anybody have a guide/tutorial on how to do this that actually _worked_
for them?  Stress: "tried and actually worked".

Pete

PS- The only DVD's that I've successfully authored are with Nero.  The
quality of avi->dvd was completely unacceptable.  After posting a message on
filesoup.com, I was told that the Nero encoding system was sub-standard and
to use TMPG or CCE.   But surely I can do the job, just as well and even
faster, using open source tools?

-- 
The mathematics of physics has become ever more abstract, rather than more
complicated.  The mind of God appears to be abstract but not complicated.
He also appears to like group theory.  --  Tony Zee's "Fearful Symmetry"

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