[vox-tech] Authoring DVDs

[R. Douglas Barbieri]

Pete,

Here is the page from my talk on Digital Video on Linux last year:
http://lugod.org/meeting/past/2004.02.03.php

All I have are Open Office Impress notes here: 
http://lugod.org/presentations/dv_talk.sxi
I hope these can be of some use to you.

Here is the process I used from memory (a bit unreliable, but should 
steer you in the right direction). I used the mjpegtools to convert raw 
AVI into MPEG2 (both audio and video, and there is a tool to multiplex 
the streams as well in the package...see http://mjpeg.sourceforge.net).

I used dvdauthor to master the image. I believe you can make it so that 
there is no menu and the video starts playing as soon as you put the DVD 
in the drive. Or at least a plain-jane menu that says "Click here to 
start." Here is the link to the DVD author docs: 
http://dvdauthor.sourceforge.net/doc/index.html. Also, it looks like 
there are some tutorials off of the main site: 
http://dvdauthor.sourceforge.net/

Then use the dvd+rw-tools to create the image (if you are using 
dvd+r(w)--if not, dvdrecord should work).

For me, I managed to get playable video, but I had a lot of trouble 
trying to get the DVD menu to work properly. But that was a year ago and 
it looks like dvdauthor has come a long way since then. Also, and I 
think I've mentioned this before on the list, but check out QDVDAuthor: 
http://qdvdauthor.sourceforge.net/. It looks like they are still at 
alpha-0.0.8, but it might be usable (back when I looked at it it was at 
alpha-0.0.1 or something like that, and it really didn't do much).

Good luck!

Doug

Peter Jay Salzman wrote:
> 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?
> 

-- 
R. Douglas Barbieri
doug at dooglio.net
http://www.dooglio.net