[plug] DVD movie

[Timothy White]

On 6/19/06, Gavin Chester <sales at ecosolutions.com.au> wrote:
> I'm looking to make 'backups' of my 'home' movies on dvd and was
> wondering what gpl tools others are using to do this.  I had thought to
> use mplayer + mencoder + libdvdcss.  Is there a foolproof (that fool is
> your's truly ;-) ) way to do this - maybe even a nice gui point and
> click way?  (sorry, all you CLI warriors)

Well, I must say, it all depends on WHAT you want to do. I have
mastered a number of DVD's  under linux, and being a CLI warrior,
quickly dismissed the GUI's as being too difficult.

I can't find it all right now, but googling will find most of it (i'm
heading out right now).

mplayer+mencoder to put the movie files in the correct format for
burning to DVD (MPEG 2 with AC3 audio I think it is. Make sure you use
AC3, and not the MPEG Audio stuff, cause AC3 is supported by more DVD
players).

Then there are a number of Gui's for putting the DVD together,
including creating menus. If you don't need menu's, and are fine with
using the remote to select which movie you want, then it becomes
really easy, with dvdauthor. If you are going to need to be making a
number of almost identical DVD's, then create the XML config file, and
change the values in there, other wise you can create everything on
the command line with command line options.
Otherwise, for a gui, try DVD styler, which will help create menus as
well. It's not the easiest to use, but you get the hang of it after
awhile.

Finally (as all of the above will eventually create you an ISO), burn
the iso to a DVD.

For example (the quickest example I could find)
$ sudo cdrecord -v driveropts=burnfree -eject -dao speed=4 dev=ATA:1,1,0 dvd.iso

If I had time, I'd find my burning options I use, but I don't have time atm.

Hopefully, that'll give you enough to start googling around, there are
full tutorials out there, which I learnt off. Done properly, and with
the right mencoder options to get maximum quality, you can do some
flippin amazing stuff! I never did get around to scripting it all into
something much easier, probably cause each DVD I was mastering, was
more than just slightly different from the last. Still, the mencoder
stuff, has scripts out there, that let you just select quality, and it
does the rest.

If you need more help (after googling and reading tutorials), feel
free to ask me, and when I get time, I'll dig up the stuff I did.

Tim
p.s. Don't use windows for this, it really sucks. Especially in things
like encoding the files, cause it's SO slow! Plus, you have much
better control under Linux ;-)
-- 
Linux Counter user #273956