Mar 10

Burn a DVD on Linux/Ubuntu

Category: Linux,multimedia   — Published by tengo on March 10, 2008 at 6:53 am

Coming from Windows, doing simple tasks on linux or ubuntu can sometimes appear to be hard.

To make things easier, here's the routine to burn a video DVD on ubuntu:

Use (!) tovid, a wrapper for all the underlying scripts and tools. If you haven't installed it yet

sudo apt-get tovid

use tovid to create the basic menu structure. When I used tovid the last time, the actual transcoding was okay, but madea a few errors we'll fix later. For a full 140 Minutes of DV video, I could get a good fit for the DVD (which is 4,7GB) with quality settings to "6".

After that I edit the tovid-created XML file and remove the superflous track entries.

Then use makexml. This command will give you a DVD with simple menu and three video streams sorted under the topic Dailies:

makexml -overwrite -dvd -menu "/home/user/mydvd/Menu_Container.mpg" -group

"/home/user/Part1.avi.tovid_encoded.mpg"

"/home/user/Part2.avi.tovid_encoded.mpg"

"/home/user/Part3.avi.tovid_encoded.mpg"

-endgroup -out "/home/user/Dailies_DVD"

finally fire up makedvd to calculate the VOB structure

makedvd "/home/user/Dailies_DVD.xml"

and then burn your data with

makedvd "/home/user/Dailies_DVD.xml"

Further reading:

http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=183936
http://gentoo-wiki.com/HOWTO_Create_a_DVD